thebooksmugglers

Women to Read: September 2020

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 19:26:29 GMT

Women To Read is a regular column from A.C. Wise highlighting female authors of speculative fiction and recommending a starting place for their work.

Welcome to another edition of Women to Read! If you’re new to the series, with each column, I recommend four women you should be reading, and point to a specific place to start with their work. This column also has a sibling-series, Non-Binary Authors to Read, packed with even more reading recommendation goodness.

I would say I’m on a horror kick as Autumn slowly approaches, but let’s be honest – I’m always on a horror kick. That being the case, I have two horror novels, and two horror/dark short stories to recommend this time around. As the weather (again, slowly) starts to cool and the leaves start to turn, it’s the perfect excuse to grab your favorite warm beverage, curl up somewhere cozy, and enjoy some chilling reading.

Jennifer McMahon is a Vermont-based author with multiple novels to her name, and my recommended starting place for her work is the New York Times bestseller, The Invited .

The set-up is a familiar one: couple Nate and Helen move to a remote location with the intention of building their dream home and quickly discover the land has a dark past and may be haunted. Back in the 1920s, a woman named Hattie Breckenridge lived on the land, was accused of witchcraft, and was eventually hanged. Her young daughter survived her, leading to a whole line of seemingly-cursed women, each meeting an unpleasant end.

It was a scrabbling, gnawing sound coming from under the bed. Steady and grinding. There was something down there. Something with sharp teeth. Something chewing its way up to them.

While the set-up may be familiar, McMahon quickly flips the traditional haunted house tropes. Helen deliberately sets out to build her house with as many relics related to Hattie Breckenridge and her descendants as possible. As the title implies, this haunting is invited. The novel’s approach to ghosts and the traumas of history is fascinating on several levels. Helen choice to build a haunted house is a wonderful inversion, putting her in control – at least to some degree – of the events happening around her. While distrust and paranoia test her relationship with Nate, and while sinister things are afoot all around, the reader is never left with the question that often plagues haunted house stories – why does the haunted family stay? In this case, curiosity and compassion are the answer. Helen immediately recognizes there is more to Hattie’s story. Instead of a witch seeking revenge and cursing the land as a result of her traumatic death – another familiar trope – Helen believes Hattie was maligned, and seeks to understand her and offer some measure of peace if she can. Women being made monstrous as the result of trauma is another staple of the horror genre, and while I love a good traditional haunted house story, and the enduring curse due to a violent death can be done very well, it’s refreshing to see a different take on both themes. None of the creep factor or the tension is lost as a result, making The Invited is highly satisfying horror read.

Laura Mauro is a fiction writer, a pro wrestling journalist, and the Women’s Wrestling Editor for Steelchair Magazine. My recommended starting place for her work is “When Charlie Sleeps” originally published in Black Static, and republished in Best British Horror 2014 and her collection, Sing Your Sadness Deep.

Like many of the stories collected in Sing Your Sadness Deep, “When Charlie Sleeps” is unsettling, and draws much of its horror from what it leaves unexplained. Hanna lives in a decaying house with Mercy, Stella, and an entity they refer to as Charlie, who occupies the upstairs bathroom. None of them know precisely what Charlie is, only that it is vital that they keep him happy and, as much as possible, keep him asleep. Terrible things happen when Charlie is awake, manifestations that affect the house, and – so Hanna’s roommates tell her – if left unchecked, the whole of London.

It’s hot in the bathroom, thick and tropical like the inside of a vivarium. Hanna closes the door behind her with a click. Across the room is a cast-iron bathtub, the enamel stained yellow like old bones. The tiles are furry with black mildew, the windows obscured by newspaper. She breathes deep, easing her nerves, and heaves the bucket onto the counter.

Hanna resents being drawn into her role as one of Charlie’s caretakers. Charlie is an innocent, but also a creature of want. He cannot be reasoned with, only soothed and kept asleep with lullabies and songs. Charlie may be a parasite, but he’s a symbiotic one, vital to the city.

Charlie can be seen as a version of the buried child, but rather than suffering abuse so the rest of the city can flourish, he’s a monstrous thing that must be placated, even if he’s horrible through no fault of his own. He’s a force of nature, in a way, frightening and misunderstood, lonely but dangerous. There’s something almost childlike about Charlie, and Hanna, Mercy, and Stella can be seen as reluctant and resentful parents, feeding and caring for a child that is all hunger and want, interrupting their sleep, and unable to explain his needs or understand what they are doing for him. Caring for Charlie calls on them to be unselfish, for uncertain rewards, and it seems only a matter of time before the task proves to be too much.

“When Charlie Sleeps” is full of evocative and visceral descriptions. Again, much of the horror here comes from what is left unexplained. Particularly early on in the story, before Charlie’s nature is explored, the story draws tension from and plays with the idea that the scariest thing is indeed a closed door with someone unknown, and perhaps unknowable, on the other side.

Alma Katsu has been nominated for multiple awards, including several for my recommended starting place with her work, The Hunger , a historical horror novel retelling and reimagining the story of the Donner Party.

The story is told from multiple viewpoints, including those of Mary Graves, one of ten children traveling west with her family, Tamsen Donner, the young and beautiful wife of George Donner, believed by many to be a witch, and Charles Stanton, a bachelor traveling on his own, an oddity among a party made up of families. Katsu weaves these perspectives together to tell a rich tale, while giving each perspective its space to breathe and making each character feel alive and fully-realized. A sense of dread pervades the novel, partially from the known history and the fate that must ultimately befall the characters, but also from from the writing itself.

Mary took the paper. It was brittle and fragile from many days in the heat. She unfolded it carefully, afraid it might disintegrate in her hands. The ink was faded, as though it had been written a long time ago, but she didn’t have any problem making out the words. Turn back, it said in a thin, spidery hand. Turn back or you will all die.

As tragedy stalks the party, paranoia builds among its members. There is plenty of finger pointing, and plenty of blame, including self-blame. Each member of the party comes with their own baggage, and their own demons. Katsu does an excellent job of layering the characters and their stories together, steadily increasing the tension and the sense of threat, and suggesting multiple possibilities for the curse that seems to stalk the party before ultimately revealing the truth. The Hunger is satisfying as a character study, as a historical novel, and as a supernatural horror novel, all perfectly balanced into a highly atmospheric and chilling whole.

Kay Chronister is a Tuscon-based short story writer, and my recommended starting place for her work is “The Fifth Gable” which originally appeared in Shimmer Magazine and is reprinted in her collection, Thin Places.

Four women share a gabled house, growing children from the earth, fermenting them, and building them from spare mechanical parts. One day, a young woman named Marigold Hest comes to them, seeking a child, unable to conceive by conventional methods.

The second woman to live in the four-gabled house pulled her children from the ground like stubborn roots. They came out of the soil smelling of pollen, with faces like tulips. They were healthy until she cut their stems, and then they withered. They returned reedy and gray-faced to the earth.

One by one, the women try, and one by one, the children fail to thrive. Marigold suffers with each loss, and the women suffer too. The story tends more toward dark fantasy than outright horror, but there are horrific things within it – the sacrifices required in making a child, by whatever means, and the pain of loss when those sacrifices don’t work out. The story also explores the notion of motherhood being the expected role of a woman, her only purpose to produce a child, no matter what the cost. Marigold desperately wants a child, but she’s afraid to say why, implying it is not solely on her own behalf, but also implying she hasn’t fully questioned her own desires and whether this is truly what she wants, or what she’s be conditioned to want. This concept is explored through the denizens of the house as well, who each come to the house with a certain identity, one that they no longer recognize in themselves now that they’re dedicated to house and making children.

The story has a surreal and dream-like quality to it, and the prose is full of striking and lovely imagery. A sense of sorrow hangs over the story, but a sense of hope as well, and the two are bound together, suggesting that one is not possible without the other. To care for someone else, like a child, is to open yourself up to the possibility of pain, and it’s up to each person to decide for themselves whether that hurt, or potential hurt, is worthwhile.

The post Women to Read: September 2020 appeared first on The Book Smugglers.

A New Book by Zen Cho? Hell yes! Announcing: Black Water Sister – due out May 2021

Tue, 01 Sep 2020 13:17:24 GMT

Hello everybody and we have Most Excellent news to share! Zen Cho – author of SORCERER TO THE CROWN, THE TRUE QUEEN and more recently, THE ORDER OF THE PURE MOON REFLECTED IN WATER – has a new book coming out in May next year and we have the full scoop, with the author herself telling us allll about BLACK WATER SISTER.

Ah Ma may be dead, but she’s not done with life yet . . .

When Jessamyn Teoh starts hearing a voice in her head, she chalks it up to stress. Closeted, broke and jobless, she’s abandoning America with her parents, bound for Malaysia – a country she left as a toddler.

She soon learns the new voice isn’t even hers, it’s the ghost of her estranged grandmother. Ah Ma was a spirit medium, avatar of a mysterious deity called the Black Water Sister. Now Ah Ma’s mission is to deal with a gang boss who offended her goddess, and she’s decided Jess will help her – whether she wants to or not.

Drawn into a world of gods and ghosts, Jess finds that making deals with capricious spirits is a dangerous business. As Jess fights for retribution for Ah Ma, she’ll also need to regain control of her body and destiny – or the Black Water Sister may finish her off for good. And all the while, she has to stop her dead grandmother from spying on her personal life, spilling her secrets to her family and using her body to commit felonies. Suddenly, finding a job seems the least of her worries . . .

One of the standard questions you get when you’ve written is a book is: “What was your inspiration for writing it?”

I always find it hard to answer. A short story or a novella may come to me in a flash of inspiration, birthed by a single image or memory or sensation. But a novel is made up of any number of things, absorbs energy from any form of stimulation you feed your brain while you’re working on it. Here are some answers for BLACK WATER SISTER:

When I was a child and living in the US (it was only for a short time), I drew a picture that made my mother say to herself, “If we stay, the children are going to get a complex.”

So we went home – that is to say, back to Malaysia. Some of this book is about what it might have been like if we had stayed a little longer.

If home is the place where nobody can tell you “go back to where you came from”, though, Malaysia isn’t our home. That’s probably China, where a grandparent and some great-grandparents came from. They, and the other Chinese migrants who came south to settle in Malaya, brought their gods and ghosts with them.

I always figured my family was not religious because we never talked about that stuff when I was growing up, beyond the occasional order “not to shout at the wind or the thunder god will punish you”, or the explanation that we had sweet sticky niangao at Lunar New Year to feed the Kitchen God, so as to gum up his mouth when he went to give his report on the household to the Jade Emperor.

When I got older, I realised that we never talked about that stuff because my family really believed. You don’t simply mouth off about gods and spirits. Someone might hear you.

Some years ago I picked up a book in Malaysia – an academic text, published by a university press. On the cover was a grainy photo of a Datuk Kong altar under a tree, with lit incense laid out as an offering. The book was called The Way That Lives in the Heart: Chinese Popular Religion and Spirit Mediums in Penang, Malaysia, by Jean DeBernardi, an anthropologist. It was about all the things my family hadn’t talked about. Once I read it, I realised I was going to write a story inspired by it.

(Datuk Kong are really cool. Here’s an article about them.)

I’m interested in the things that we don’t talk about because they’re dangerous – to ourselves; to our conception of the people we’re supposed to be; to our ideas of how the world should work.

Black Water Sister is about the things families don’t talk about. Unhappy histories. Buried scandals. What people did that they shouldn’t have done. The push and pull of love and dependency and wanting to be free. Being someone who doesn’t fit what your family wants of you. Queerness. Gods and ghosts.

It’s also about Penang, one of my favourite places in the world, and about hipster cafes, and gentrification, and being a stranger where you should belong.

And – consistent with almost everything I’ve written – it’s about dealing with strong-minded aunties who have forcefully clear ideas about how you should lead your life. Not that I have direct personal experience of that or anything, cough.

It’s the most personal novel I’ve written yet. It may be my best. It’s funny and sad and strange. I really hope readers connect with it. You can pre-order it now at the links below.

Publisher page for Black Water Sister

Publisher page for Black Water Sister

International

Book Depository (free shipping worldwide)

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Book Review: CHOSEN ONES by Veronica Roth

Wed, 19 Aug 2020 04:01:00 GMT

Veronica Roth is back with an adult(ish) SFF offering, taking the Chosen One trope to the next level.

Title: Chosen Ones

Author: Veronica Roth

Genre: Speculative Fiction/Science Fiction

Publisher: John Joseph Adams / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication Date: April 2020
Hardcover: 432 pages

The first novel written for an adult audience by the mega-selling author of the Divergent franchise: five twenty-something heroes famous for saving the world when they were teenagers must face even greater demons—and reconsider what it means to be a hero . . . by destiny or by choice.
A decade ago near Chicago, five teenagers defeated the otherworldly enemy known as the Dark One, whose reign of terror brought widespread destruction and death. The seemingly un-extraordinary teens—Sloane, Matt, Ines, Albie, and Esther—had been brought together by a clandestine government agency because one of them was fated to be the “Chosen One,” prophesized to save the world. With the goal achieved, humankind celebrated the victors and began to mourn their lost loved ones.
Ten years later, though the champions remain celebrities, the world has moved forward and a whole, younger generation doesn’t seem to recall the days of endless fear. But Sloane remembers. It’s impossible for her to forget when the paparazzi haunt her every step just as the Dark One still haunts her dreams. Unlike everyone else, she hasn’t moved on; she’s adrift—no direction, no goals, no purpose. On the eve of the Ten Year Celebration of Peace, a new trauma hits the Chosen: the death of one of their own. And when they gather for the funeral at the enshrined site of their triumph, they discover to their horror that the Dark One’s reign never really ended.

Stand alone or series: Book 1 in The Chosen Ones series

How did I get this book: Bought

Format (e- or p-): Print

Review

Remember 2011? A time when one could leave one’s house without fear of contracting a fatal contagion, sure, but also a time when YA dystopias were in full swing, and Veronica Roth emerged in the YA SFF scene with her addictive debut novel, Divergent, and its faction-based vision of the future.

2011 seems like a long time ago now–Divergent, Insurgent, Allegiant and their film counterparts tales from a distant past–but having read and reviewed all of those books (and yes, even the first film), I was excited to learn of Veronica Roth’s foray into adult SFF with a brand new series. (And given lockdown, why not escape to a parallel universe with a group of superheroes struggling with their past choices, and a resurgence of evil threatening their future?)

Chosen Ones begins with a solid hook: the year is 2020, and the world is safe from the threat of the Dark One. That’s thanks to the fact that back in 2010, five then-teenagers (Sloane Andrews, Matthew Weekes, Inez Mejia, Albert Summers, and Esther Park) stopped the Dark One’s increasingly powerful chaotic attacks. Since then, the world has returned to normalcy, safe from the threat of Drains (the Dark One’s preferred method of destruction) though the scars of the past are still very visible–not only in cities like Chicago, where Drain sites remain a terrifying power-void, but also for the five heroes who used their magical gifts to save the day. Sloane Andrews, one of the so-called “chosen ones” hasn’t had the easiest time adjusting to being a public figure and hero after ten years–a large part of that is PTSD from having been abducted by the Dark One prior to their final battle (and the choices that she made, which become gradually unveiled to readers over the course of the novel). But a large part of it is self-denial and self-preservation; take, for example, the fact that Sloane lives with her boyfriend and fellow Chosen One, Matthew Weekes, whom she knows she is supposed to love and confide in, but with whom she has nothing in common other than their traumatic past.

Then, the unthinkable happens: one of the Chosen Ones dies. Albert Summers–Albie, to his friends–commits suicide by way of drug overdose, following the ten year anniversary celebration of the Dark One’s defeat at the Chicago Drain site. The remaining four friends are heartbroken–Sloane especially suffers with the loss. Albie was the only other person in the group who understood her, who was by her side when they were captured and tortured (though, once again, more of Sloane’s memories surface throughout the book especially where the Dark One and Albie are concerned).

At Albie’s funeral–a small affair to spread his ashes at the Chicago Drain site, per his wishes (every Chosen One has an “in case I don’t make it” contingency plan)–another unthinkable thing happens. One moment, Sloane, Matt, and Esther are standing on dry land; in the next, they are sputtering lake water in a parallel universe. The Dark One wasn’t defeated, you see. The battlefield, and the stakes, have just jumped across dimensions.

There’s a lot to love about Chosen Ones, pushing the validity and entirety of the “chosen one” archetype, while asking important questions: what happens when you grow up and you don’t have all the answers? What happens when you are a supposed hero, but don’t have any other battles to fight? Why doesn’t the world ever stay saved? Roth’s strength lies, as it did with the Divergent trilogy, with her protagonist. Sloane grapples with these big questions, while presenting a front for the outside world and even towards her fellow chosen ones, which becomes especially fraught when her relationship with Matt buckles under pressure. Who the world thinks Sloane is, who Matt thinks Sloane is, who Sloane thinks she herself is–these are big, soul searching revelations that drive the novel’s narrative. While Sloane grapples with her own sense of identity and power, there’s a parallel secondary storyline that unfolds through classified documents and news articles. Sloane has been trying to reclaim her past, and as we readers go through these different epistolary interludes, we–like Sloane–gradually understand the larger picture, and the depth of the exploitation of the chosen ones by their authority figures.

While the depth of Sloane’s character and the nature of the revelations she faces are undeniably powerful, other aspects of the story are less well-polished. For example, while I love the surprising shift from Part One to Part Two, Chosen Ones feels like two books that have been fused together–there’s the slower burn of Sloane’s search for meaning and identity, which then becomes an interdimensional portal story, which then becomes a showdown with an archnemesis. All of this is super rad, but the delivery is pretty remarkably uneven.

Also uneven were the other characterizations, beyond Sloane–Matt and Esther have a lot of potential that never really feels realized, as these other two chosen ones fail to rise beyond supporting cast status. (Also, Inez is in the book for like four chapters, and gets a pretty bum deal.) It was also slightly frustrating that–of course!–a predictably dull love interest twist pops up in the book’s second act.

These criticisms voiced, though, Chosen Ones is still a hell of a ride. I loved the imaginative scope of the story and its ultimate resolution–Roth takes the chosen one trope and subverts it again and again to pretty awesome effect. I’m excited to return to this strange new world.

Rating: 7 – Very Good

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A scattered journey through Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Mon, 17 Aug 2020 10:56:00 GMT

You thought you were prepared for this book. You were, and I can’t stress this enough, not.

You loved Gideon the Ninth. In fact, you may have uttered words like “best book of 2019”, “genius” and “most fun I ever had reading a book in decades” and also “this book eviscerated me from inside like lyctor soup”.

So coming to Harrow the Ninth with your SOUL eviscerated by the previous book, dehydrated from sobbing your heart out and grieving but with your feelings and your memory somewhat dulled by time and by pretending things would be ok, you realise something very soon into the narrative that…

This is not Gideon the Ninth. Because there is NO GIDEON.

At least, not in a certain way.

You thought you may have been prepared for that given the end of the first book. The joke is on you, silly knuckle.

This new rollercoaster is a feverish dream of an unreliable second person narrative that does the UNPARDONABLE sin of rewriting memory and erasing a certain personage from most of the narrative. You do however, love unreliable narratives and narrators and this one is so cleverly done.

It is unpardonable though because it hurts so bad. But also because it brings back OTHER DEAD PEOPLE. The hurt is bad but also good, you think to yourself late at night staring into nothing.

In a book about necromancy, you would think this is par for the course, but the author is ready to stab you in the back like certain betraying immortals.

But then you find that your feelings of grief and loss are mimicked by the narrative – in Harrow. And you see her actions and struggle with her mental health and a trauma that is both historical and freshly new.

And beyond the personhood of the shared narrative arc of Harrow and Gideon, there is a larger story being told, a story that started in the last book, or, rather, ten thousand years ago.

And being a historian, you notice that what’s happening in this series is that history is being checked mated. A history written by the victors and by a God named John (how utterly silly, you think, until God has a threesome and you like Harrow want to avert your eyes) who created an Official Narrative but there is a different side to it, a different narrative and that narrative is trying its absolute best to come to the surface. You realise you don’t know who the villains are. There is a story told about people and God, and faith and historical action and belief.

Lies, you are certain.

Then you go back to the Dramatis Personae on literally page 1 and realise all is foreshadowed.

GENIUS, you whisper to yourself.

But also confusing and vague and there is a certain amount of earned trust in the author but is that trust perhaps squandered a bit, you wonder. Maybe, because so, so much of it is very disorienting. You did find yourself rollercoasting through this feverish hellscape of a narrative, lost and often confused, and does it all coalesce into a beautifully built necromantic skeleton or does it fall apart without muscles and tendons and blood and heart?

You are not so certain, your eyes far too dry when the last page rolls in.

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HAUNTED HEROINE: SARAH KUHN ON INSPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 10:57:00 GMT

Hello everybody! We have Sarah Kuhn back to the blog today to talk about the fourth HEROINE novel, the inspirations and influences behind it and what it means to go back to the start and write again from the perspective of the first heroine in the series plus… how it all connects to The Baby-Sitters Club and a carpet ball.

Four years ago, I visited you here at the home of the illustrious Book Smugglers to talk about my debut novel Heroine Complex. Today I’m visiting you to talk about the fourth book in the series—and the start of a brand-new trilogy—Haunted Heroine.

No matter how many times I type those words, they do not seem real. My Asian American superheroine book that became a trilogy has now become a full-on series! There’s continuity and timelines and stuff! People have favorite characters and ’ships! I actually have to remember what I wrote in the first book, because it matters for something that’s happening now!

I’d always wanted to write a series, but I have to admit that once it became a reality…I realized there were things I absolutely did not think about when I was creating the world of put-upon superhero personal assistant Evie Tanaka way back when. I had a lot of questions for/fights with Past Me while writing this book and launching the series into its next stages, and I thought I’d share how I worked through all that and prevented my head from exploding. (Although to be honest, it did explode a few times.)

Theme? What’s a Theme?

The first Heroine Complex trilogy has a different protagonist for each book: fire-wielding wallflower Evie Tanaka, diva celebrity superheroine Aveda Jupiter (aka Annie Chang), and upstart chaos princess little sister Bea Tanaka. All three get a chance to narrate us through their adventures, and all three go through the second coming of age many of us experience in our early 20s.

That “second coming of age in your 20s” thing is what I considered to be the unifying theme of these books, alongside the usual theme for all of my work, Asian Girls Having Fun.

To be honest, I never thought I would climb back into Evie’s head again. I’d left her happy, in love, and in control of her superpower. Her relationships were finally sorted out, and she had decided to embark on a superheroing partnership with her best friend, Aveda. She had also been through a lot. The thought of taking her back to a place where she wasn’t happy or was struggling with any of this felt cruel, and I desperately did not want to do what certain sequels to my favorite movies have done (looking at you, Ms. Congeniality 2!): I didn’t want to rip away all the progress she’d made or undo any of the realizations she’d had or tear down her hard-earned happiness and relationships. I wanted her to enjoy the beautiful life she’d built.

When the first book came out, I relived a lot of it with readers. I felt, very deeply, how close I had been to Evie, and how much I cared about her. And in talking about her, in hearing what she meant to others…I was suddenly dying to hang out in her head again. But I had to do it in a way that didn’t strip away all that she’d gone through or reset all the progress she’d made.

In short, I had to come up with a new theme!

Not the Asian Girls Having Fun part—that obviously had to stay and I wouldn’t have it any other way. But if the theme of the first trilogy was “the second coming of age we experience in our early 20s”…then what would Evie be dealing with now? She’s [spoiler alert!] married, pregnant, in her 30s, and still fighting evil and saving the city with Aveda.

That is a lot of good stuff. It’s also…a lot to be dealing with at once. Just thinking about everything she had to contend with in this new stage of her life…it made me happy, but it also made me very tired.

And that’s what gave me my theme—the Having It All Myth. This idea that in order to be fully functioning humans worthy of love and empathy, we need to Succeed at Absolutely Everything and Look Great While Doing So. I think this is something a lot of us deal with. Especially women. And most especially women of color. I knew all three of my heroines would deal with this concept differently—Wallflower Evie, Diva Aveda, and Chaos Princess Bea. (Aveda and Bea are both getting a sequel too as part of this new trilogy!)

I knew Evie—like me—would try to show up for all the parts of her life fully and equally, that she would flounder and fail at times, and that she would experience the same feelings of inadequacy and impostor syndrome that I so often do. I knew she would have empathy for everyone around her, but would struggle to conjure it for herself.

I also knew that she would eventually have a lot of fun while on this journey. (And she does. This book is nicknamed Horniest Heroine for a reason.)

Location, Location, Location

We’ve spent three whole books exploring demon-infested San Francisco, and while I love it…I had a yearning to expand the world of Heroine. I wanted my girls to go places! I asked Past Me why she’d confined so much of the demonic action to a single city—couldn’t there be evil in other areas for my heroines to battle?

Well…yes. I realized, as the person who writes these books, I could invent new evil and put it other places. In this case, I had a direct inspiration that was not just my own rage-y thoughts about Ms. Congeniality 2.

I wanted to write the Baby-Sitters Club Super Specials of my series!

If you are not familiar, the Baby-Sitters Club books are a very important series for many women of my generation, tracking a delightful group of tweens who are obsessed with providing quality childcare. It was recently made into what is possibly the best TV show ever, and you can watch it on Netflix. Anyway, in the Super Specials, the BSC usually goes to some exciting new location, like the Bahamas or Paris or…Vermont. And sometimes the Super Specials are also tied to a fun holiday!

With this new trilogy, I decided we’d explore some new places—in this first book, I took Evie and Aveda over to the East Bay to investigate a series of hauntings at a local women’s college during Halloween. Crafting a creepy, ghostly, pumpkin spice-enhanced atmosphere for the heroines made the series feel fresh again to me—it gave them a whole new series of “sets” and characters to play with, and it made me feel like I was decorating a whole new room in my series’ Barbie Dream House. The Halloween bit also enabled me to answer questions like, “What would Evie and Aveda dress up as?! And what are some other, ahem, creative uses for these costumes?” (Back to Horniest Heroine…)

Also, my girls actually do end up kind of babysitting! Their mission requires them to go undercover as grad students, and in doing so, they meet a little gang of college kids that they become very invested in. Which brings me to my final inspiration/influence…

Real Life

The haunted women’s college in Haunted Heroine is called Morgan College, but it’s based a bit on the actual haunted women’s college I attended—Mills College. (Only the good parts, though, I promise.)

Past Me had intended for the resemblance to my own college days to be minimal, but writing about the scent of the eucalyptus trees, the old dorms full of shadowy nooks and crannies, and the late-night runs to Taco Bell transported me fully back to that time period.

And before I knew it, I’d ended up adding a lot of elements based on favorite memories: late-night bonding sessions with new friends over silly things, throwing old dining hall plates off the roof of my dorm as a way of getting my anger out, creeping around some of the older buildings in an attempt to see an actual ghost…

And of course…Carpet Ball. Carpet Ball is a stuffed blob of muddy green that one of my best college friends, Kelly, had in her dorm room. It looks like it is made out of 70s-era shag carpet, hence the name. As time went on, it became part of our daily life. Sometimes you might pet Carpet Ball for comfort. Or toss Carpet Ball out of frustration. Or marvel at the fact that Carpet Ball had probably never been washed, ever, because no one could quite figure out how to accomplish such a task. When I told my college friends I was writing a book inspired by our days at Mills, someone immediately asked: “Can Carpet Ball be in it?!”

Carpet Ball

And so Carpet Ball is, providing Evie with some comfort and humor as she embarks on this next stage of her life. Truly, sometimes inspiration comes from the most unexpected places.

Sarah Kuhn is the author of the popular Heroine Complex novels—a series starring Asian American superheroines. The first book is a Locus bestseller, an RT Reviewers’ Choice Award nominee, and one of the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog’s Best Books of 2016. Her YA debut, the Japan-set romantic comedy I Love You So Mochi, is a Junior Library Guild selection and a nominee for YALSA’s Best Fiction for Young Adults. She has also penned a variety of short fiction and comics, including the critically acclaimed graphic novel Shadow of the Batgirl for DC Comics and the Star Wars audiobook original Doctor Aphra. Additionally, she was a finalist for both the CAPE (Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment) New Writers Award and the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. A third generation Japanese American, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and an overflowing closet of vintage treasures.

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Holy Guacamole: WE WON A HUGO AWARD?!

Sat, 01 Aug 2020 17:48:44 GMT

We are speechless. After multiple nominations and losses, starting back in 2014–we were like, the Leo Dicaprios of the Hugo Awards–THE BOOK SMUGGLERS WON A HUGO AWARD FOR BEST FANZINE LAST NIGHT!

WHAT AN ACHIEVEMENT! WHAT A DELIGHT! (Yes, we know that rhymes.)

We are overwhelmed, incredibly touched, and hugely thankful to everybody who voted for us. This means a lot to the both of us.

However we must say it has also been a bittersweet win in many aspects. We are far away from each other, our celebratory hugs and high fives were granted virtually–which is awesome, and necessary, given the global pandemic. Above all, in spite of our personal happiness and being thrilled for all the amazing winners, we are deeply unsettled with many aspects of the awards ceremony. (We do appreciate all of the effort that went into making a completely virtual awards show happen, which is a thankless and doomed-at-the-outset endeavor.) Technology issues aside, many parts of the show were uncomfortable, and downright enraging, to watch.

George R.R. Martin was the host this year and in between his pre-recorded messages and his live performance, he sadly managed to somehow be simultaneously boring, infuriatingly oblivious (we are going with this perhaps too-gracious reading), yet often offensive. Even if we were to overlook the mispronunciations of several nominee names (all finalists were required to provide a phonetic pronunciation guide that got lost, we guess?), our major source of frustration was Martin’s blithe praise of several known fascist, racist, and sexist authors in what can only be described as this overlong, bloated, egotistical white-dude fest that glorified a past that should no longer be glorified when we have right here, RIGHT NOW such an amazing, forward-thinking, diverse SFF community who should be the ones being glorified and celebrated. (We mean, just listen to the winners’ speeches, especially the powerful words from R.F. Kuang, Chimedum Ohaegbu, Jeannette Ng, and S.L. Huang–but seriously, virtually every winner had something important and, yes, political to say.)

…. and breathe!

Back to our celebration! The full list of winners can be found here and if you want to check out the ceremony and hear the amazing speeches given by the winners, Chelsea of TheReadingOutlaw did the amazing work of editing the ceremony to remove the toastmaster’s bits and you can watch it all here. Our bit starts at 17 minutes and you can watch Thea delivering our speech.

But for easy and accessible reference, here is our written speech:

We are being wholly, utterly honest when we say HOLY GUACAMOLE, we did not see this coming. Thank you, fellow fans, readers, writers, and creators so much.
We know that it can be frowned upon to be Political at the Hugos, but we also know that everything is political, so f that. We have been running The Book Smugglers for over ten years, as two loud, opinionated women on the internet–one of us Filipino-American and the other Brazilian. We have been giving space for diverse voices to be heard, read, and seen, and we know now that is even more important now than it has ever been, in the fight for social justice in the face of fascism, systemic oppression, and racism around the world. Black lives matter.
So thank you so much for this award–our very first Hugo. Thank you for seeing us, for hearing us, for believing that our work matters.
Thank you to all of our fellow nominees, and to our regular contributors–especially Charles Payseur and A.C. Wise.
Thank you to all of the readers and friends who have supported us throughout the years. To everyone who keeps coming back to read The Book Smugglers–we are nothing without you. Special shoutout to Sparkle Rocket and to the Filipino contingent at the Hugos.
It’s also worth mentioning that Ana is now the first Brazilian to ever win a Hugo. (Valeu Brasil!)
Finally, a huge thank you to the television show Lost–without which The Book Smugglers would never have happened.
Thank you again, from the bottom of our SFF-loving hearts, and remember to stay safe, wash your hands, and wear a mask.
Thank you.

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Hugo Award Packet 2020

Mon, 06 Jul 2020 20:50:47 GMT

Hello, friends! We are pleased to announce that The Book Smugglers are finalists for the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Fanzine!

Every year, the Hugo Awards are administered and voted on by members of the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon). The Hugos are typically presented at the end of Worldcon weekend in late August–though this year, of course, things are a little different. The 2020 Worldcon, CoNZealand, scheduled for 29 July – 2 August 2020 in Wellington, New Zealand, has announced that they will be a “virtual online convention” without a physical convention this year due to the global COVID-19 pandemic (and we Smugglers respect and understand the decision from the CoNZealand committee–stay home, stay safe, wash your hands, and wear a mask, people!)

Art by Reiko Murakami

We are thrilled to be included in the roundup for this year’s finalists for Semiprozine–which includes Galactic Journey, Journey Planet, Quick Sip Reviews, the Rec Center, and Nerds of a Feather Flock Together. It’s tradition for Hugo Finalists to provide sample work in the year’s Voter Packet–this year, we’ve selected some of our favorite reviews. Whether or not you’re a voting member of Worldcon, we hope you’ll enjoy the selection of content we’ve put together below.

Download the PDF

Thanks for your consideration–and we hope to see you on the live webcast!

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Queering Dr. Watson: Sexual Identity in The Angel of the Crows

Mon, 29 Jun 2020 13:13:46 GMT

Katherine Addison, the author of award-winning The Goblin Emperor, has a new fantasy novel out, a dark Fantasy that is mash-up of Jack the Ripper and the detectives of Baker Street. We have a guest post from the author today, talking about the work, and its queer characters.

SPOILER ALERT: Dr. J. H. Doyle is not what you think.

I am not the first writer to notice that you can use a first-person narrator to play games with sex and gender roles. Emma Bull (Bone Dance) and Sarah Caudwell (The Shortest Way to Hades), to name two off the top of my head, do a great job of using first-person to keep their narrators’ sexual identities in question. I followed suit in The Angel of the Crows.

I did this partly, let’s be honest, because it was fun. It was fun to write Doyle as someone with a secret (well, with several secrets), and it was fun to write the people around Doyle reacting to the projected image and to know that they were wrong. You’ll notice that Crow never uses a pronoun when talking about Doyle, because Crow knows from the beginning that Doyle’s biological sex and performed gender do not match, and understands human society enough to know that it has to be a secret.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories are very much a product of their time. As such, they are sexist, classist, and racist, with white (English) professional-class men representing the pinnacle of human evolution. They are also profoundly homosocial, since the relationship between Holmes and Watson is the (generally unspoken, except for that once in “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs”) foundation on which all the stories are built. Men’s relationships are paramount, and I can’t think of a story that even has a scene where you could try to apply the Bechdel Test. One reason Irene Adler in “A Scandal in Bohemia” is such a brilliant creation is that she is the protagonist; she is the one who beats Holmes at his own game (and cross-dresses successfully to tweak him). But Irene is an exception, recognized explicitly as such (“To Sherlock Holmes, she is always the woman.”); she exists in a category of one.

It is possible to recognize these things about the stories and still love them.

But the temptation to subvert is very strong.

In The Angel of the Crows, I made Holmes into an angel, which, as we learn later in the novel, means that he is both asexual and technically female and puts him solidly in the professional class of the novel’s London (insofar as angels fit into any human class system at all), looking for someone to go halves on the rent of a flat in Baker Street.

Which brings us to Dr. Watson and Dr. Doyle. Watson in the original stories is the perfect professional-class representative homosocial heteronormative (Scots-)Englishman, the perfect foil for Holmes’s brilliant intellect and sharp wit. (I don’t know if the text really supports the reading that Watson is deliberately down-playing his own intelligence to make Holmes look even better, but I hope it does because otherwise you start wondering about how he made it through medical school.) And what I wanted to do in The Angel of the Crows was to present that façade but have something quite different going on beneath it.

The question of Doyle’s sexual identity is a vexed one. You can read Doyle as a trans man, although that term is completely unavailable to the characters, or you can read Doyle as a transvestite lesbian. Or you can read Doyle as profoundly genderqueer (also a term not available to the characters). You notice I’m trying hard not to use pronouns, and that’s because I don’t want to invalidate any of those readings. It’s important, because names in this book are so thematically significant, that Doyle considers Joanna his/her/their real name—that Doyle has in fact consistently refused to choose a different name, going only by initials. Doyle and I can get away with this because in the closed homosocial world of Victorian professional-class men, no one ever refers to anyone except by his surname anyway. Never once does Holmes call Watson “John” and the only person who calls Holmes “Sherlock” is his brother Mycroft. (We never learn Lestrade’s given name, either.) But beyond the choice to hold onto the given name, I can’t go. I truthfully do not know how Doyle gender-identifies. Which is no impediment to a first-person narrative, but does make it hard to talk about.

Both Doyle and Crow are performing Victorian normative masculinity, but neither one of them fits it. In a way, they’re playing dress-up as Holmes and Watson, but in so doing, they make a friendship that is genuine. I’m suggesting, I think—I hope—that the roles of Holmes and Watson, Detective and Sidekick, are available to anyone who wants to play, that the archetype is strong enough to withstand as many re-imaginings as we can come up with.

The friendship has to be real. That’s the part that matters.

KATHERINE ADDISON’s short fiction has been selected by The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and The Year’s Best Science Fiction. She is the author of the Locus Award-winning novel The Goblin Emperor. As Sarah Monette, she is the author of the Doctrine of Labyrinths series and co-author, with Elizabeth Bear, of the Iskryne series. She lives near Madison, Wisconsin.

The Angel of the Crows is out now.

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The Best of British Fantasy 2019: An Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2020 12:17:00 GMT

The Best of British Fantasy 2019 contains two dozen tales of the weird and wonderful: featuring pensive houses, angry gods, ghosts, monsters, living statues, were-creatures, sorcerers, swordsmen, spells, skeletons, and, of course, the end of the world. Stories by Lavie Tidhar, Eliza Chan, Kirsty Logan, Chikodili Emelumadu, Maura McHugh, Heather Parry, Gareth Rees, Sara Saab, Natalia Theodoridou, and many more.

We are pleased to welcome its editor, Jared Shurin, to talk a bit more about it today.

“Someone will be along to dig you out.”: The Best of British Fantasy 2019

The best metaphor for a ‘year’s best’ anthology is the parable of the blind men and the elephant. As you may remember, each of the blind men touches a different part of the elephant and immediately, if justifiably, believes they know the entire nature of the beast. The man holding the tail thinks an elephant is like a rope, the one touching the leg thinks it is a tree, the one holding the trunk assumes it is serpentine.

All, according to their experience, are correct. Yet every one is also, objectively, wrong.

It is only by collecting enough blind men that we can begin to understand the true nature of the elephant. A novel, however brilliantly written, is, at best, one blind man with exceptionally sensitive fingers. An anthology, while not having that singular depth, gives us more hands: the collection of impressions required to feel out the edges of a vast and multi-faceted beast.

In the introduction to the previous volume, I wrote about the role of The Best of British Fantasy could play in capturing the past for the sake of the future. An anthology, I argued, can provide a snapshot of a particular point in time, capturing the feel of a moment for far distant readers. Many legendary anthologies – say, Dangerous Visions or Nelson Algren’s Own Book of Lonesome Monsters – accomplish this: ambitious collections that use fiction to help the 21st century reader glimpse some of the themes, concerns, and cultures of mid-20th century life.

In thinking about an anthology’s duty to the future, I completely neglected what it means to those of us in the present.

As I write this, we have entered the second month of mandated social distancing. My two countries – where I was born and where I live – are both facing economic and cultural ruin. Tens of thousands have died, a growing statistic that becomes more gruesome every day. I, like many of you, have friends and family risking their lives every day in hospitals, at care homes, in supermarkets and warehouses. We live in communal, collective anxiety.

Perversely, there are fewer opportunities for distraction. The cultural sector is near-universally furloughed. Sports have come grinding to a halt. Amazon, for the second time in as many months, has removed the ‘buy’ button from books as ‘inessential’. Reality is inescapable.

Given the state of our present, fantasy stories may seem trivial or ‘inessential’. But they have two, slightly contradictory, but very important, roles to play.

First, fantasy helps us escape reality.

Escapism can often be a dubious virtue, but given our current imprisonment, there’s unquestionable value right now. We cannot step out to dinner, but we can still cross into Narnia. It is easier to walk into Mordor than to the office. Reality is inexorable and inescapable. What is happening is so unquestionably important, that our minds do nothing else but whir frantically, trying to make sense of it.

As a result, and unsurprisingly, a recent ONS survey reveals that almost half of Britons currently report high levels of anxiety. The simple act of escape – of turning off, of giving yourself a break – has become essential. Escapism need not be Disneyfied, cheery, or overly simplistic: it is a matter of moving from here to there; a good story that allows the reader to ponder someone else’s problems for a change. In this volume you’ll find many ways of escape. Some are literal escapes, such as a flying carpet or a persuasive spirit. Others take place in captivating worlds, far from our own: ancient sailing ships, forgotten kingdoms, deep under the ground or high atop impossible sculptures. They draw us in – or, more critically, out – with seductive atmosphere, high-flying adventure, good humour, haunting horror, and impossible feats of magic. Enjoy them, as they are meant to be enjoyed: without guilt. You – we – all deserve some time away. As Gareth E. Rees’ story in this collection says, we all deserve a ‘fragile, momentary sanctuary’.

Second, fantasy helps us understand reality.

Some realities are simply too big to be understood except through stories. Stories, narratives, help us comprehend the incomprehensible. Stories are our hands on the elephant; they allow us to find the edges of the things, to capture abstractions into shapes.

Our current situation is too much for a single narrative. There’s no special spell or magic cloak; there’s no sword to wield or dragon to slay with it. There is no ring of power, no wizard, no prophecy or Crack of Doom. We’re trapped in the worst of stories: there’s too much going on, no resolution, a billion conflicts without a villain.

And that’s why we need fantasy: it allows us to simplify the incomprehensible; as Douglas Adams put it, to ‘eff’ the ineffable. A good narrative helps us reduce the inexplicable into a form that we can understand, resolve, and even act upon. Although the stories contained within were all first published before the Covid-19 outbreak, they are good stories (the best, in fact), and address themes that are still very relevant. We have a child learning to accept loss, a man learning to love, a family learning to survive. There are stories about sacrifice, and commitment, and bravery.

There’s a tale in here about how scary change can be, and another about how coming to grips with the past. There are several about loneliness, some about isolation, several about loss, and many more about friendship, and all the strange and wonderful forms it may take. Perhaps most importantly, there are stories here about survival, acceptance, and love. These are fantasy stories that understand tragedy, loss and fear, but also remind us that there is much, much more in life: redemption, companionship, and hope.

Perhaps the most eerily prophetic story in this book is the first, by Helen McClory. It captures, disturbingly, a world fearing [redacted]: seemingly wracked by a generic, all-encompassing, apocalyptic event. McClory manages to give voice to formless dread, but also, and far more importantly, reminds us that this is a shared experience, and, somewhere over the horizon, this too shall pass. When reality is cruel and abstract, fantasy can provide reassurance and perspective. As McClory elegantly reminds us: the world around you is kinder than you imagine now.

I look forward to sharing a kinder future with you.

The Best of British Fantasy 2019 is out on June 30 and you can get your copy here.

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Non-Binary Authors to Read – May 2020

Thu, 28 May 2020 14:03:13 GMT

Non-Binary Authors To Read is a regular column from A.C. Wise highlighting non-binary authors of speculative fiction and recommending a starting place for their work.

Welcome to another edition of Non-Binary Authors to Read! While we’re all stuck inside, we need excellent things to read, no? Here are four wonderful stories that speak to themes of family and home for your social distancing reading pleasure!

Sam Kyung Yoo is a queer non-binary writer of speculative and literary fiction. My recommended starting place for their work is “Even Robots Can Cry” published in Fireside Magazine, which straddles the line between both of those genres.

Simon faces incredible pressure from his parents to be the perfect student. He applies that same pressure to himself, studying at all hours of the day and night to the point where his roommate, Gene, accuses him of being a robot. In truth, Simon is beginning to feel a bit like a robot, programmed to become a doctor, every minute of his life scheduled with some input that will help him achieve that goal, with little thought to what he actually wants in life.

Simon thinks being a robot would make everything so much easier. Streamlined data retrieval, able to recharge whilst remaining operational. Not needing sleep would be a wonderful reallocation of time.

Simon’s sister, Sun-Hee, refused the med school path their parents tried to set her on, following her dream to become a musician, which essentially led to her being cut off from the family. Simon feels even more isolated with the loss of his sister, the one person who might understand him. The problem is, unlike Sun-Hee, he doesn’t know what he would want to do with his life instead. He’s been programmed for one thing for so long, he isn’t even certain of his own dreams.

The story does a wonderful job of exploring the cultural and parental pressure put on Simon as a Korean child, now considered by his parents to be their only hope. Simon’s breakdown over the course of the story is paralleled with the breakdown of his laptop, showing how even machines can be pushed to a limit where they can’t physically function anymore. Simon’s thinking is even mechanical. He constantly does calculations of how much time he’s spent on certain tasks, or how many days left until this test, or that essay deadline. He views his parents’ love as a conditional relationship – if he doesn’t provide the appropriate input in the form of good grades, he won’t get the desired result. When the situation finally reaches a breaking point, it is both cathartic and heartbreaking for the journey Simon takes to get there.

It’s a beautifully-written story, which uses the science fictional trope of artificial life to great effect. There are no actual robots in the story – it is fully grounded in the real world – but as the best science fiction does, this story gives us a lens through which to explore the main character’s emotional life and their humanity.

Setsu Uzumé is a speculative fiction writer, and an Assistant Editor and Host at PodCastle. My recommended starting place for their work is “The Lawman’s Boy” published in Bourbon Penn.

Where Yoo’s story skirts the line between speculative and literary fiction, Uzumé is firmly in speculative territory with a weird western where the sins of the father literally become the sins of the son. Palla is a lawman and her husband Kitche just happens to be a criminal. She’s tasked with tracking him down, which she does, shooting him in the process, and then she must do everything she can to keep him alive in order that his spirit doesn’t pass into their son and turn him just as bad as his father.

“I chose, you chose. It’s done,” she said. Same thing she said when he’d walked out on her and the baby, sixteen years ago. It had made it easy to sell him out, along with all the other thieves she knew how to find. “We’re gonna do this lawful. Go to trial, they’ll execute you proper, and get your soul sealed away. Tie up all the loose ends of your frayed, sorry life.”

Of course, Kitche has other ideas about securing his legacy and continuing with his criminal career. He’s just too good at thieving to give it up, even if it means sacrificing his body, and taking over the life of his son.

Uzumé gives the story a distinctive voice that captures the Western feel, and does an excellent job with worldbuilding to inject it with a sense of the weird. The story is stylish with an emotional core that makes it pair well with Yoo’s story. Despite the authors’ very different approaches, both stories explore parents living vicariously through their children. While one does it more literally, both instances leave scars, and reading the stories together makes for an interesting study of the way parents and children perceive themselves in relation to each other, and where their responsibility to each other lies. One story is told from the child’s perspective and the other from the parent’s, but in the end, many of the questions they ask are the same – how much am I allowed to be my own person, how much do I owe to those who came before me, or who come after me, and what impact do my choices have on others?

Matthias Klein is an author and collector of dead things and my recommended starting place for nir work is “The Art of Quilting”, which first appeared in the anthology Survivor edited by Mary Anne Mohanraj and JJ Pionke and reprinted in Transcendent 4: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction edited by Bogi Takács.

Vin is far from home, living on Venus, but that doesn’t stop nir parents from tracking nem down. It seems no matter where ne goes, nir parents find nem, following nem to Mars, Venus, Pluto, the Moon, and beyond. They claim only to want what’s best for nem, expressing concern and the desire to bring nem home, which ultimately drives Vin farther away.

Ne didn’t want to leave. Not yet. Not ever. Ne was just building a life, a real existence here. No rules, no frames, no requirements. The world was not what Vin was raised to believe it was, and ne didn’t want to live in that other place, that unquestioning, dutiful place where ne had no power, no agency, no self.

As Vin continues to flee from place to place, ne quilts, rescuing scraps of fabric and beads and stones that speak to each place ne settles, no matter how temporarily. Deep black-blue for Venus, cool blue-grey for the moon, and crystals for Pluto, stitching them together into a gorgeous work of art they carry with them from place to place. Nir parents remain relentless, insisting they love nem, even as they refuse to acknowledge nir identity and call nem by the wrong name, trying to fit nem into a box of their own perception, rather than seeing nem for who ne are.

Like Yoo and Uzumé’s stories, Klein also explores the fraught relationships between parents and children, and the damage parents can do – wittingly or unwittingly – by refusing to see their children as people of their own, and not merely extensions of themselves. “The Art of Quilting” is a heartbreaking story, but one that also offers hope. On top of the exploration of family, the story also explores the concept of home. Tired of fleeing from place to place, Vin finally finds nemself on a ship traveling between the stars. Rather than treating the ship as yet another means to get to a place ne will eventually have to leave, ne realizes the ship itself can be a home. Home does not need to be the place you come from, or the place you’re going – it can be the place you create and carry with you, as Vin creates nir quilt from pieces of the places ne has been. The ship, like the quilt, is a home that can travel with nem, and the crew a family built from seemingly disparate and overlooked pieces into a beautiful whole.

Juliet Kemp is a queer non-binary author based in London. My recommended starting place for their work is “Growing Resistance” published in Translunar Travelers Lounge.

Oak and his husband live on the margins of society, among the have-nots, invisible to the haves on the other side of the wall. Those beyond the wall are the ones who could afford the vaccine during the plague, while Oak and those like him, had to come up with their own vaccine, but not before many lives were lost. Oak is a chemist, providing much needed drugs and medicine for his community, putting him on precarious legal footing with those on the other side of the wall.

Mathias, Oak’s husband, comes up with a plan to blockade the rail line, forcing those on the other side of the wall to finally acknowledge the less affluent community that they left to their own devices during the plague. The action is successful, and Mathias escapes with only a broken arm, but Oak’s assistant, Vera, a trans teenager, is caught up in the aftermath and arrested, even though she wasn’t involved. Since Vera and her brother have no parents, some other adult must collect them, or she will be assigned a guardian – one who may or may not respect her identity and allow her access to the hormones she needs. No one else in the community has a valid government ID, except for Oak.

What my ID says—what I hate most about it—is that I could walk right through that gate right now if I chose to. I don’t, and I won’t, because it’s all fucking bullshit. The only reason I’m allowed inside is because my family bought me the vaccine. I let them do it because I hadn’t realised then what it was going to mean.

In addition to misgendering him, Oak’s ID is a reminder of where he came from, and the people he’s ashamed of now for their callousness during the plague. For Vera’s sake though, Oak must face his past, and take the risk that he will be lumped in with the agitators and be arrested.

While Oak’s parents are not a physical presence in the story, the echoes of their lifestyles and choices speaks to the some of the same themes seen in Yoo, Uzumé, and Klein’s stories. Oak is set apart from his family and his roots, building a new family of choice on the other side of the wall. A different facet of caring and guardianship is explored as Oak is forced to take responsibility for Vera on paper at least, though their relationship remains one of teacher and apprentice. Contrasted with the parent-child relationships explored in other stories, Kemp offers a relationship built on respect and freedom of choice. The themes of economic disparity and the invisibility of those living on the margins of society are also powerful ones. Each of the stories discussed here stands perfectly on its own, but they are all also given extra layers of meaning when read together for the variety of ways they understand family, home, community, and the relationships between the people that make up each of those concepts.

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Social Distancing Reads #5: The Last Emperox by John Scalzi

Thu, 23 Apr 2020 11:20:27 GMT

Hello everybody – hope you are all keeping safe. I am lucky enough to be exclusively working from home and as I do so, I am trying to create a mental health routine of comfort reading, writing, going for (safe) walks and TV watching. Since I have read over 30 books so far this year, I will start posting about my recommended Social Distancing Reads more frequently as a way to catch up and keep up.

Times being what they are, The Last Emperox was a salve for my ailments, the perfect ending to this fantastic trilogy by John Scalzi. Also, thank the fucking gods for Kiva fucking Lagos. What a delight, what a pleasure, what a tremendous privilege to follow this character and see where she got to go. And how.

The how is of course part of the storyline of The Last Emperox, the series ender to end all series, concluding a story that took us through multiple twists around the Interdependency as we followed a new Emperox – Garland II – take her mantle at the wrong fucking time, or rather perhaps, at the precisely right time. Because only a good person could effectively handle the problem that was presented to her right at the beginning: what makes all these colonies interconnected was coming to an end, with the imminent collapse of the Flow system and the ensuing potential collapse of civilization and death of billions.

Things being what they are, now and in the book, it feels eerily prescient for Scalzi to be writing about the collapse of what can be felt as “normal” with the rich nefariously getting together to become richer and not giving a damn fuck about the lives of regular, “expendable” people.

So here we follow our heroes and heroines doing their absolute best to save others, while the Machiavellian villains do their absolute worst to fuck everybody. And not in a good way, as Kiva fucking Lagos would say.

The plot twists are many (and GASPABLE) but really the character development here is what makes the book – and my heart – sing. These are admittedly fewer words than what the book, the characters and the series deserve, but things being what they are, it is the best I can do right now.

I just urge you to go and read this whole series.

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Social Distancing Reads #4: The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune

Mon, 13 Apr 2020 13:04:10 GMT

Well, this was WONDERFUL in every possible way: heartwarming, lovely, romantic, funny and full of unbridled optimism and the belief that humans are actually good and will eventually do the right thing. It is incredible how the good old cynical me, instead of feeling like this is an impossible naïve scenario, was instead left with a sense that everything is possible and good will always win. It was an welcome respite from Our Trying Times and the first book I managed to read in one sitting for a long time.

Linus is a by-the-book caseworker employee of a ministry of magic – he is responsible for visiting orphanages for magical children and make sure they are alright. When is called by a the Extremely Upper Management to go on a secret mission to investigate an orphanage far away from everything on a island by the sea (he has never seen the ocean!), he is taken aback but orders are orders and he will follow them. He is given case files for six children and their carer – a man named Arthur. When he first opens the first file he cannot believe his eyes and literally passes out. The children, they are impossible, rare magical beings that could potentially be dangerous.

When he arrives on the island, it is with a mixture of fear and anxiety but with the belief that he is there doing the right thing.

Linus is a forty-year-old gay man who thinks he is past his prime, who doesn’t believe he has anything of note to contribute to the world and who is perfectly fine thank you very much just spending time in his little house, with his little fussy cat, listening to old albums on his little Victrola and whose only spot of colour is the little sunflower he has planted. It is of course, IMMEDIATELY obvious to everyone he meets when he arrives on the island that Linus is a caring, nurturing, fiercely protective man who will do everything to right perceived wrongs, to help the children and to support Arthur.

The book proceeds to then melt my heart as it builds up this mismatched family. This being the book that it is, Linus is immediately smitten with the children and Arthur. What follows next is a slow build up of a found family, of a group of misfits finding each other and fighting the System and a romance between Linus and Arthur that is a mix of wonderful pining and almost-conversations and slow dances and long-held looks. It is a book of quiet revelations, of deep transformation and of the world-wide effect of doing the right thing.

And I loved it so damn much, I want the whole world to read it.

The post Social Distancing Reads #4: The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune appeared first on The Book Smugglers.

So you want to read about the end of the world? (A Book List)

Fri, 10 Apr 2020 20:40:57 GMT

The world is a little scary right now. (As a New Yorker who lives in Queens, I feel this fear acutely at this particular point in time.) If you are a reader of apocalyptic and dystopian fiction, or a lover of horror, you might be familiar with that inexplicable desire to explore that discomfort and fear through films or literature–I certainly do. Maybe it’s because you want to feel like the world we’re living in is a little less scary than the one you’re reading about. Or, maybe it’s because you want to sort out your own feelings about the current state of things. Perhaps its a form of schadenfreude.

Regardless of your motivation, if you want to read more about apocalyptic scenarios–this list is for you.

THE STATION by Emily St. John Mandel

An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.
A National Book Award Finalist
A PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist
Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.
Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.

“Survival is inefficient.” Emily St. John Mandel’s novel depicts the end of the world, succumb to a flu pandemic that strikes quickly and kills efficiently. Alternating between before and after, Station Eleven hits pretty close to home right now.

Read the review here.

THE PASSAGE by Justin Cronin

“It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.”
An epic and gripping tale of catastrophe and survival, The Passage is the story of Amy—abandoned by her mother at the age of six, pursued and then imprisoned by the shadowy figures behind a government experiment of apocalyptic proportions. But Special Agent Brad Wolgast, the lawman sent to track her down, is disarmed by the curiously quiet girl and risks everything to save her. As the experiment goes nightmarishly wrong, Wolgast secures her escape—but he can’t stop society’s collapse. And as Amy walks alone, across miles and decades, into a future dark with violence and despair, she is filled with the mysterious and terrifying knowledge that only she has the power to save the ruined world.

Justin Cronin’s take on the apocalypse is by way of an infection–but one markedly different from the St. John Mandel’s flu. By that I mean: it’s a vampire virus. A very different take on vampires, but still vampiric, nonetheless. Featuring a narrative that is split between before and after the end of life as we know it, The Passage is devastating and hopeful apocalyptic fiction at its best. (Unfortunately the rest of the series doesn’t quite hold up–but don’t let that deter you from Book 1.)

Read the review here.

THE BOOK OF M by Peng Shepherd

WHAT WOULD YOU GIVE UP TO REMEMBER?
Set in a dangerous near future world, The Book of M tells the captivating story of a group of ordinary people caught in an extraordinary catastrophe who risk everything to save the ones they love. It is a sweeping debut that illuminates the power that memories have not only on the heart, but on the world itself.
One afternoon at an outdoor market in India, a man’s shadow disappears—an occurrence science cannot explain. He is only the first. The phenomenon spreads like a plague, and while those afflicted gain a strange new power, it comes at a horrible price: the loss of all their memories.
Ory and his wife Max have escaped the Forgetting so far by hiding in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods. Their new life feels almost normal, until one day Max’s shadow disappears too.
Knowing that the more she forgets, the more dangerous she will become to Ory, Max runs away. But Ory refuses to give up the time they have left together. Desperate to find Max before her memory disappears completely, he follows her trail across a perilous, unrecognizable world, braving the threat of roaming bandits, the call to a new war being waged on the ruins of the capital, and the rise of a sinister cult that worships the shadowless.
As they journey, each searches for answers: for Ory, about love, about survival, about hope; and for Max, about a new force growing in the south that may hold the cure.
Like The Passage and Station Eleven, this haunting, thought-provoking, and beautiful novel explores fundamental questions of memory, connection, and what it means to be human in a world turned upside down.

Peng Shepherd’s debut novel is heartbreaking and profound, illustrating the end of the world due to a mysterious pandemic that causes its victims to forget. At first, it’s small things, like the color of a small household item–but soon the forgetting consumes its victims, who forget where they came from, or how to read, or eventually who they are. What’s more, these infected also start to reimagine the world–their forgetting results in them shaping the world in their own new strange ways. The result is beautiful, and very, very sad.

Read our reviews here and here.

THE FOREST OF HANDS AND TEETH by Carrie Ryan

In Mary’s world there are simple truths.
The Sisterhood always knows best.
The Guardians will protect and serve.
The Unconsecrated will never relent.
And you must always mind the fence that surrounds the village; the fence that protects the village from the Forest of Hands and Teeth.
But, slowly, Mary’s truths are failing her. She’s learning things she never wanted to know about the Sisterhood and its secrets, and the Guardians and their power. And, when the fence is breached and her world is thrown into chaos, about the Unconsecrated and their relentlessness.
Now, she must choose between her village and her future, between the one she loves and the one who loves her. And she must face the truth about the Forest of Hands and Teeth. Could there be life outside a world surrounded in so much death?

There are quite a few zombie apocalypse novels that could have been included on this list–This is Not A Test by the exceptional Courtney Summers, The Walking Dead series by Robert Kirkman, Max Brooks’s World War Z, or Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies, for example–but I decided to only include only two. As far as the end of the world by the undead goes, The Forest of Hands and Teeth is one of my favorites. Imagine a world decades after the apocalypse–the only survivors live in the woods in a religious enclave, protected by the safety of fences that surround their perimeter. Mary dreams of the ocean, and tales of the world before, passed down by her long-dead mother–when calamity strikes her village, she finally has the chance to leave, though it will cost her everything.

Read the review here.

THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS by M.R. Carey

In the ruins of civilization, a young girl’s kindness and capacity for love will either save humanity — or wipe it out in this USA Today bestselling thriller Joss Whedon calls “heartfelt, remorseless, and painfully human.”
Melanie is a very special girl. Dr Caldwell calls her “our little genius.”
Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When they come for her, Sergeant keeps his gun pointed at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don’t like her. She jokes that she won’t bite, but they don’t laugh.
The Girl With All the Gifts is a genre-defying, emotionally charged thriller that will shatter your expectations of the classic zombie novel.

The Girl With All the Gifts started as a short story–the novel’s exceptional first chapter. A heartbreaking, horrifying story about medical research and the children who might hold the key to saving humanity, M.R. Carey’s take on the zombie apocalypse plays heavily on the relationship that forms between a teacher and the titular girl with all the gifts, named Melanie.

Read the review here.

AGNES AT THE END OF THE WORLD by Kelly MacWilliams

The Handmaid’s Tale meets Wilder Girls in this genre-defying novel about a girl who escapes a terrifying cult only to discover that the world Outside has succumbed to a viral apocalypse.
Agnes loves her home of Red Creek — its quiet, sunny mornings, its dusty roads, and its God. There, she cares tirelessly for her younger siblings and follows the town’s strict laws. What she doesn’t know is that Red Creek is a cult, controlled by a madman who calls himself a prophet.
Then Agnes meets Danny, an Outsider boy, and begins to question what is and isn’t a sin. Her younger brother, Ezekiel, will die without the insulin she barters for once a month, even though medicine is considered outlawed. Is she a sinner for saving him? Is her sister, Beth, a sinner for dreaming of the world beyond Red Creek?
As the Prophet grows more dangerous, Agnes realizes she must escape with Ezekiel and leave everyone else, including Beth, behind. But it isn’t safe Outside, either: A viral pandemic is burning through the population at a terrifying rate. As Agnes ventures forth, a mysterious connection grows between her and the Virus. But in a world where faith, miracles, and cruelty have long been indistinguishable, will Agnes be able to choose between saving her family and saving the world?

This novel from Kelly McWilliams isn’t out until May, but I urge you to preorder the book because it is ever so relevant today. Agnes and her family are members of a secretive cult, who believe in the supreme, divine power of its leader. But Agnes starts to question her world when her brother falls ill–and then, the rapture hits. Agnes is a bold, refreshing take on religion and faith, patriarchy and the abuse of power, all set against an apocalyptic background. I loved this book, and I think you will too.

[Full disclosure: I worked with the author on this book and its marketing campaign.]

SALVATION DAY by Kali Wallace

A lethal virus is awoken on an abandoned spaceship in this incredibly fast-paced, claustrophobic thriller.
They thought the ship would be their salvation.
Zahra knew every detail of the plan. House of Wisdom, a massive exploration vessel, had been abandoned by the government of Earth a decade earlier, when a deadly virus broke out and killed everyone on board in a matter of hours. But now it could belong to her people if they were bold enough to take it. All they needed to do was kidnap Jaswinder Bhattacharya—the sole survivor of the tragedy, and the last person whose genetic signature would allow entry to the spaceship.
But what Zahra and her crew could not know was what waited for them on the ship—a terrifying secret buried by the government. A threat to all of humanity that lay sleeping alongside the orbiting dead.
And then they woke it up.

In the category of near-apocalyptic SFF thriller, Salvation Day is one of the best new entries that I’ve read in a long time. (I thought about including Michael Crichton and Daniel H. Lewis’s The Andromeda Evolution on this list for this particular close-call subgenre of the apocalyptic canon, but Kali Wallace’s novel is just better. Examining themes of humanity and systemic inequality, Salvation Day is science fiction at its best.

SWEET TOOTH by Jeff Lemire

Kids like Gus have a price on their heads.
Seven years ago, the Affliction raged like a forest fire, killing billions. The only children born since are part of a new breed of human-animal hybrids. Gus is one of these children, a boy with a sweet soul, a sweeter tooth-and the features of a deer.
When vicious hunters descend on his isolated forest home, a mysterious and violent man called Jepperd rescues Gus. The hulking drifter promises to lead Gus to The Preserve, a fabled safe haven for hybrid children.
As the two cross this dangerous new American frontier, will Jepperd corrupt the boy he’s nicknamed Sweet Tooth, or will Gus’s heart change Jepperd?
Written and illustrated by spectacular talent Jeff Lemire, SWEET TOOTH is a haunting tale of survival in post-apocalyptic America of friendships formed in tragedy, and the good and bad in humankind. Collects SWEET TOOTH #1-12, as well as never-before-seen sketches and an introduction by celebrated actor Michael Sheen (Masters of Sex, Frost/Nixon).

The cat’s out of the bag with writer/artist Jeff Lemire, but my favorite of his works remains this limited series. Sweet Tooth is the story of a young boy who is born after the world has ended–a virus killed billions, sparing few humans in its wake. One of the virus’s parting gifts to humanity is its effect on the next generation–any new children born have human-animal hybrid features, like tails and snouts, or horns and deer-like legs. More importantly: only these hybrid children are truly immune to the virus.

Read the review here.

EXTINCTION POINT by Paul Antony Jones

First comes the red rain: a strange, scarlet downpour from a cloudless sky that spreads across cities, nations, and the entire globe. In a matter of panicked hours, every living thing on earth succumbs to swift, bloody death. Yet Emily Baxter, a young newspaper reporter, is mysteriously spared—and now she’s all alone.
But watching the happy life she built for herself in New York City slip away in the wake of a monstrous, inexplicable plague is just the beginning of Emily’s waking nightmare. The world isn’t ending; it’s only changing. And the race that once ruled the earth has now become raw material for use by a new form of life never before seen…on this planet.
With only wits, weapons, and a bicycle, Emily must undertake a grueling journey across a country that’s turning increasingly alien. For though she fears she’s been left to inherit the earth, the truth is far more terrifying than a lifetime of solitude.

Apocalypse via alien invasion is an old staple in the end-of-the world canon–and there are plenty of fantastic books and films that tackle this particular theme. Paul Antony Jones’s Extinction Point appeals to me on a personal level as a New Yorker; as heroine Emily discovers an empty city, devoid of any other survivors of the red rain, you feel her terror and desperation. This isn’t the most polished book on the list, but the series delivers a timely kick and feels especially relevant to this NYCer.

Read the review here.

THE END OF OCTOBER by Lawrence Wright

In this riveting medical thriller–from the Pulitzer Prize winner and best-selling author–Dr. Henry Parsons, an unlikely but appealing hero, races to find the origins and cure of a mysterious new killer virus as it brings the world to its knees.
At an internment camp in Indonesia, forty-seven people are pronounced dead with acute hemorrhagic fever. When Henry Parsons–microbiologist, epidemiologist–travels there on behalf of the World Health Organization to investigate, what he finds will soon have staggering repercussions across the globe: an infected man is on his way to join the millions of worshippers in the annual Hajj to Mecca. Now, Henry joins forces with a Saudi prince and doctor in an attempt to quarantine the entire host of pilgrims in the holy city . . . A Russian émigré, a woman who has risen to deputy director of U.S. Homeland Security, scrambles to mount a response to what may be an act of biowarfare . . . Already-fraying global relations begin to snap, one by one, in the face of a pandemic . . . Henry’s wife, Jill, and their children face diminishing odds of survival in Atlanta . . . And the disease slashes across the United States, dismantling institutions–scientific, religious, governmental–and decimating the population. As packed with suspense as it is with the fascinating history of viral diseases, Lawrence Wright has given us a full-tilt, electrifying, one-of-a-kind thriller.

An eerily timed forthcoming title, The End of October is Lawrence Wright’s exercise in examining how a modern day pandemic could bring the world to its knees. Read more about the author’s essay on the current pandemic and the intersection with his work here.

LIFE AS WE KNEW IT by Susan Beth Pfeffer

I guess I always felt even if the world came to an end, McDonald’s still would be open.
High school sophomore Miranda’s disbelief turns to fear in a split second when an asteroid knocks the moon closer to Earth, like “one marble hits another.” The result is catastrophic. How can her family prepare for the future when worldwide tsunamis are wiping out the coasts, earthquakes are rocking the continents, and volcanic ash is blocking out the sun? As August turns dark and wintery in northeastern Pennsylvania, Miranda, her two brothers, and their mother retreat to the unexpected safe haven of their sunroom, where they subsist on stockpiled food and limited water in the warmth of a wood-burning stove.
Told in a year’s worth of journal entries, this heart-pounding story chronicles Miranda’s struggle to hold on to the most important resource of all—hope—in an increasingly desperate and unfamiliar world. An extraordinary series debut!
Susan Beth Pfeffer has written several companion novels to Life As We Knew It, including The Dead and the Gone, This World We Live In, and The Shade of the Moon.

Last but certainly not least is another personal favorite. Susan Beth Pfeffer takes a simple premise in this first novel: what would happen if the moon’s orbit was skewed closer to the Earth? This epistolary novel is told through the first person diary entries of a teenage girl who documents the end of life as she knows it in the fallout of a lunar asteroid strike–volcanic eruptions, unpredictable extreme weather patterns, plague, famine, and the collapse of society. Through it all, though, there is hope.

Read the review here.

And that’s it from me–any other end-of-the-world readers out there?

The post So you want to read about the end of the world? (A Book List) appeared first on The Book Smugglers.

On the Smuggler’s Radar

Mon, 30 Mar 2020 16:40:37 GMT

“On The Smugglers’ Radar” is a feature for books that have caught our eye: books we have heard of via other bloggers, directly from publishers, and/or from our regular incursions into the Amazon jungle. Thus, the Smugglers’ Radar was born. Because we want far more books than we can possibly buy or review (what else is new?), we thought we would make the Smugglers’ Radar into a weekly feature – so YOU can tell us which books you have on your radar as well!

On Ana’s Radar:

You know, if there is a moment for a “shocking psychological thriller” to get our minds out of THINGS, this is IT:

Lola doesn’t particularly want a new stepmother. Especially not one who has come out of nowhere and only been with her dad for three weeks. And – she’s not racist or anything – but since when did her dad like black women anyway?
Darling didn’t particularly want a new stepdaughter. Especially not one as spiteful and spoilt as Lola. She does want Lola’s dad though. And he wants her, so that’s that: Darling and Lola will just have to get used to each other.
Unless Lola can find a way to get rid of Darling.

This upcoming SF debut sounds cool:

An outsider who can travel between worlds discovers a secret that threatens her new home and her fragile place in it in a stunning sci-fi debut that’s both a cross-dimensional adventure and a powerful examination of identity, privilege, and belonging.

Multiverse travel is finally possible, but there’s just one catch: no one can visit a world where their counterpart is still alive. Enter Cara, whose parallel selves happen to be exceptionally good at dying—from diseases, from turf wars, from vendettas they couldn’t outrun. Cara’s life has been cut short on three hundred seventy-two worlds in total.

On this earth, however, Cara has survived. Identified as an outlier and, therefore, a perfect candidate for multiverse travel, Cara is plucked from the dirt of the wastelands. Now she has a nice apartment in the lower levels of the wealthy and walled-off Wiley City. She works—and shamelessly flirts—with her enticing yet aloof handler, Dell, as the two women collect offworld data for the Eldridge Institute. She even occasionally leaves the city to visit her family in the Wastes, though she struggles to feel at home in either place now. So long as she can keep her head down and avoid trouble, Cara is on a sure path to citizenship and security.

But trouble finds Cara when one of her eight remaining doppelgangers dies under mysterious circumstances, plunging her into a new world with an old secret. What she discovers will connect her past and future in ways she never could have imagined—and reveal her own role in a plot that endangers not just her world, but the entire multiverse.

I am also super into the description for this own voices dark fantasy:

A young woman living in a rigid, puritanical society discovers dark powers within herself, with terrifying and far-reaching consequences, in this stunning, feminist fantasy debut.

In the lands of Bethel, where the Prophet’s word is law, Immanuelle Moore’s very existence is blasphemy. Her mother’s union with an outsider of a different race cast her once-proud family into disgrace, so Immanuelle does her best to worship the Father, follow Holy Protocol, and lead a life of submission, devotion, and absolute conformity, like all the other women in the settlement.

But a mishap lures her into the forbidden Darkwood surrounding Bethel, where the first prophet once chased and killed four powerful witches. Their spirits are still lurking there, and they bestow a gift on Immanuelle: the journal of her dead mother, who Immanuelle is shocked to learn once sought sanctuary in the wood.

Fascinated by the secrets in the diary, Immanuelle finds herself struggling to understand how her mother could have consorted with the witches. But when she begins to learn grim truths about the Church and its history, she realizes the true threat to Bethel is its own darkness. And she starts to understand that if Bethel is to change, it must begin with her.

Oh LOOK a new Horror novel by T Kingfisher. I LOVED The Twisted Ones so I am really keen to read this new one:

Pray they are hungry.

Kara finds the words in the mysterious bunker that she’s discovered behind a hole in the wall of her uncle’s house. Freshly divorced and living back at home, Kara now becomes obsessed with these cryptic words and starts exploring this peculiar area—only to discover that it holds portals to countless alternate realities. But these places are haunted by creatures that seem to hear thoughts…and the more one fears them, the stronger they become.

With her distinctive “delightfully fresh and subversive” (SF Bluestocking) prose and the strange, sinister wonder found in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, The Hollow Places is another compelling and white-knuckled horror novel that you won’t be able to put down.

The First Sister sounds super cool and I love the cover:

Combining the social commentary of The Handmaid’s Tale with the white-knuckled thrills of Red Rising, this epic space opera follows a comfort woman as she claims her agency, a soldier questioning his allegiances, and a non-binary hero out to save the solar system.

First Sister has no name and no voice. As a priestess of the Sisterhood, she travels the stars alongside the soldiers of Earth and Mars—the same ones who own the rights to her body and soul. When her former captain abandons her, First Sister’s hopes for freedom are dashed when she is forced to stay on her ship with no friends, no power, and a new captain—Saito Ren—whom she knows nothing about. She is commanded to spy on Captain Ren by the Sisterhood, but soon discovers that working for the war effort is so much harder to do when you’re falling in love.

Lito val Lucius climbed his way out of the slums to become an elite soldier of Venus, but was defeated in combat by none other than Saito Ren, resulting in the disappearance of his partner, Hiro. When Lito learns that Hiro is both alive and a traitor to the cause, he now has a shot at redemption: track down and kill his former partner. But when he discovers recordings that Hiro secretly made, Lito’s own allegiances are put to the test. Ultimately, he must decide between following orders and following his heart.

A stunning and sweeping debut novel that explores the power of technology, colonization, race, and gender, The First Sister is perfect for fans of James S.A. Corey, Chuck Wendig, and Margaret Atwood.

On Thea’s Radar:

For my radar this week, loads of books I’ve just purchased and/or received in the mail. Starting with this forthcoming fantasy novel from the excellent Django Wexler:

Long ago, a magical war destroyed an empire, and a new one was built in its ashes. But still the old grudges simmer, and two siblings will fight on opposite sides to save their world, in the start of Django Wexler’s new epic fantasy trilogy
Gyre hasn’t seen his beloved sister since their parents sold her to the mysterious Twilight Order. Now, twelve years after her disappearance, Gyre’s sole focus is revenge, and he’s willing to risk anything and anyone to claim enough power to destroy the Order.
Chasing rumors of a fabled city protecting a powerful artifact, Gyre comes face-to-face with his lost sister. But she isn’t who she once was. Trained to be a warrior, Maya wields magic for the Twilight Order’s cause. Standing on opposite sides of a looming civil war, the two siblings will learn that not even the ties of blood will keep them from splitting the world in two.

Next up, another forthcoming Orbit title from a repeat favorite author, Melissa Caruso (set in the same universe as her excellent Tethered Mage/Sword and Fire trilogy):

The mage-marked granddaughter of a ruler of Vaskandar, Ryx was destined for power and prestige at the top of Vaskandran society. But her magic is broken; all she can do is uncontrollably drain the life from everything she touches, and Vaskandar has no place for a mage with unusable powers.
Then, one night, two terrible accidents befall her: Ryx accidentally kills a visiting dignitary in self-defense, activating a mysterious magical artifact sealed in an ancient tower in the heart of her family’s castle.
Ryx flees, seeking a solution to her deadly magic. She falls in with a group of unlikely magical experts investigating the disturbance in Vaskandar—and Ryx realizes that her family is in danger and her domain is at stake. She and her new colleagues must return to the family stronghold to take control of the artifact that everyone wants to claim—before it destroys the world.

Next up, a YA novel slated for release in May of this year–dragons!

Five royal houses will hear the call to compete in the Trial for the dragon throne. A liar, a soldier, a servant, a thief, and a murderer will answer it. Who will win?
When the Emperor dies, the five royal houses of Etrusia attend the Call, where one of their own will be selected to compete for the throne. It is always the oldest child, the one who has been preparing for years to compete in the Trial. But this year is different. This year, these five outcasts will answer the call….
THE LIAR: Emilia must hide her dark magic or be put to death.
THE SOLDIER: Lucian is a warrior who has sworn to never lift a sword again.
THE SERVANT: Vespir is a dragon trainer whose skills alone will keep her in the game.
THE THIEF: Ajax knows that nothing is free–he must take what he wants.
THE MURDERER: Hyperia was born to rule and will stop at nothing to take her throne.

Next up, a horror novel (you know I’m a sucker for those):

Inspired by a true story, this supernatural thriller for fans of horror and true crime follows a tale as it evolves every twenty years—with terrifying results.
Ella Louise has lived in the woods surrounding Pilot’s Creek, Virginia, for nearly a decade. Publicly, she and her daughter Jessica are shunned by their upper-crust family and the Pilot’s Creek residents. Privately, desperate townspeople visit her apothecary for a cure to what ails them—until Ella Louise is blamed for the death of a prominent customer. Accused of witchcraft, both mother and daughter are burned at the stake in the middle of the night. Ella Louise’s burial site is never found, but the little girl has the most famous grave in the South: a steel-reinforced coffin surrounded by a fence of interconnected white crosses.
Their story will take the shape of an urban legend as it’s told around a campfire by a man forever marked by his boyhood encounters with Jessica. Decades later, a boy at that campfire will cast Amber Pendleton as Jessica in a ’70s horror movie inspired by the Witch Girl of Pilot’s Creek. Amber’s experiences on that set and its meta-remake in the ’90s will ripple through pop culture, ruining her life and career after she becomes the target of a witch hunt. Amber’s best chance to break the cycle of horror comes when a true-crime investigator tracks her down to interview her for his popular podcast. But will this final act of storytelling redeem her—or will it bring the story full circle, ready to be told once again? And again. And again…

And then last but not least, a new YA lgbt SFF effort that sounds fantastic:

A young pilot risks everything to save his best friend–the man he trusts most and might even love–only to learn that he’s secretly the heir to a brutal galactic empire.
Ettian Nassun’s life was shattered when the merciless Umber Empire invaded. He’s spent seven years putting himself back together under its rule, joining an Umber military academy and becoming the best pilot in his class. Even better, he’s met Gal Veres–his exasperating and infuriatingly enticing roommate who’s made the Academy feel like a new home.
But when dozens of classmates spring an assassination plot on Gal, a devastating secret comes to light: Gal is the heir to the Umber Empire. Ettian barely manages to save his best friend and flee the compromised Academy unscathed, rattled both that Gal stands to inherit the empire that broke him and that there are still people willing to fight back against Umber rule. As they piece together a way to deliver Gal safely to his throne, Ettian finds himself torn in half by an impossible choice. Does he save the man who’s won his heart and trust that Gal’s goodness could transform the empire? Or does he throw his lot in with the brewing rebellion and fight to take back what’s rightfully theirs?

And that’s it from us! What books do you have on your radar?

The post On the Smuggler’s Radar appeared first on The Book Smugglers.

Book Review: AURORA RISING by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

Sat, 28 Mar 2020 17:46:11 GMT

I’ve been doing a lot of reading (and not a whole lot of writing) over the past few months. This has been a bad thing–not writing reviews all the time makes me feel sad but also means I often forget what I’ve read because I’m not logging it (and don’t even get me started on the cycle of repurchasing and returning books that I’ve realized I have already devoured). But it also has given me time to pause and survey some of the big ol’ copycat patterns that emerge across genre fiction in a given publishing cycle. I was on a craving some outer space science fiction, and realized that I had just read three books–YA, adult, and crossover–all published in 2019, all featuring female protagonists of diverse backgrounds, across four seasoned authors: Aurora Rising by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, Hullmetal Girls by Emily Skrutskie, and Salvaged by Madeleine Roux. (I promise I’ll get around to proper reviews of Hullmetal Girls and Salvaged.)

Rockstar authors Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff (aka geniuses behind the brilliant epistolary experimental fiction series The Illuminae Files) team up again in this first book in a brand new YA SFF series following a ragtag group of misfits that stumble across a much larger conspiracy and hidden history that could destroy the universe. Written in a more traditional prose style, with alternating point of view characters, Aurora Rising takes place in the year 2380, in which cadet Tyler Jones finds an emergency pod on the eve of his graduation–and by choosing to save the young woman trapped in stasis, he loses his opportunity to pick the ace squad he should have gotten as the top of the class. Sure, he’s still got his sister as his diplomat envoy and his best friend Cat as his pilot, but the rest of the team leaves a little to be desired.

Aurora Jie-Lin O’Malley, said young woman awakened from a 200 year nap, finds herself in a new world completely alone–and also the wielder of some bizarre new space/time warping superpowers that could be the spark that ends the universe. Luckily, she has some new protectors (who also become her friends) to help out in that last department…

One of my all-time favorite tropes in film and literature is Assembling The Team. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that I was immediately predisposed to like Aurora Rising with its version of Avengers Assemble: Ragtag Misfits Edition. One of the most comforting things about this trope is the fact that each character has to get over their baggage and form connections with each other in order to complete their heist/objective/universe-saving task (usually after several failures). In this regard, Aurora Rising delivers in spades. What starts as a smaller mystery involving a single character out of time and her uncertain past blossoms into a roaring ‘this could mean the end of everything’ secret–Aurora, Tyler, Cat, Finian, Kal, Scarlett, and Zila all have key roles to play in this drama. And that’s cool.

While I am a huge fan of this general trope, the reason a book or film is successful within its bounds relies heavily on the strength of its characters. If you’re going to give us the Fellowship of the Ring, the audience has to care about the individual members, right? Unfortunately, Aurora falters in this department. There are seven different characters (each with a POV chapter), each has some kind of relationship drama with another member of the cast (with the exception of one character who is entirely disengaged and also a sociopath), and each exploit archetypal character tropes. There’s the tomboy fighter pilot desperately in love with her best friend; the alpha golden boy leader who actually is earnest and responsible (think: Steve Rogers); the gorgeous redhead who can do kung-fu but also salaciously uses her sexuality to get men to give her what she wants; the savant tech geek alien who pushes everyone away with his biting sarcasm because he, like, doesn’t even NEED friends; the warrior elf alien that is strong and silent and despised by his own tribe but now finds purpose and (insta)love with his new team; the Chosen Girl with the Superpowers who must Be Protected at all costs; and the aforementioned sociopath scientist who observes them all. Also: instalove is the worst. Also also: it’s incredibly frustrating that each major pairing (because of course almost every member of this ragtag team is paired off into a romance) is heterosexual.

To make things even harder, the ratio of action to character development is woefully unbalanced–it’s hard to really nail multiple POV characters in a single book, especially if the word count is relatively low, and Aurora just doesn’t spend enough time with any single character to truly build a connection with the reader. Plus, with so much happening in the story (flying from one location to another to find one artifact/answer or another) it’s hard to focus on really understanding these characters–instead, Kaufman and Kristoff play up each characters’ idiosyncrasies in lieu of development. (Perhaps one of my biggest pet peeves in fiction: picking a “quirky” trait for a character and obsessively waving it in readers’ faces ad nauseam.)

And yet.

If you can get past the character muppetry, and if you’re a sucker for a fast paced plot, Aurora Rising really starts cooking around the novel’s midpoint, leading to a triumphant last act… and, while the emotional impact of the ending of the book is somewhat dulled by the aforementioned lack of character connection, there’s enough to compel me to come back for book 2. (Good thing it’s out really soon.)

Rating: 6 – Decent (with some major reservations), but I’ll tune in for book 2

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Social Distancing Reads #3: The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel

Thu, 26 Mar 2020 12:51:59 GMT

I was a latecomer to Emily St. John Mandel’s famous post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven, having read it years after it was published. I was charmed by its version of the apocalypse and it’s multi-layered, time-hoping, non-linear narrative.

The Glass Hotel is the author’s first novel since Station Eleven and I struggled with it a great deal.

It centres the very real financial crisis of 2008 and a very specific Ponzi Scheme (based on real life) that destroyed the lives of multiple people. And just like Station Eleven, this novel is presented in a non-linear narrative leading to 2008 then following the ripples in time from that year, following multiple characters. It is, in a nutshell: a study of responsibly and accountably and about what exactly people would do for money and privilege. There is a small element of speculative fiction here as ghosts appear from time to time, but it doesn’t overwhelm the narrative. In terms of characters, a few of them are:

Vincent and her brother Paul – estranged half-siblings, she a bartender at the Glass Hotel, Paul a recovering drug addict. There is also Jonathan, a millionaire hedge fund trader who takes Vincent as his lover (and fake-wife) and Leon, a shipping executive. These are just a handful of the characters the book follows.

To me, the book lacks not only more interesting anchor characters but also a greater, wider view of the crisis. For a book with so many characters purporting to look at victims of the 2008 financial crisis, it does so in a very diminished, restricted capacity. The victims (and at points, I’d argue, even the perpetrators), we are asked to identify with are vastly white, wealthy, male – it also doesn’t help that one of the anchor characters is the author of Ponzi Scheme himself, Jonathan who at a later stage when he is in jail paying for his crimes, the narrative expected me to sympathise with his downfall…

There is something oddly dissonant about it all.

Especially when considering how the financial crisis of 2008 was a worldwide, structural phenomenon that hit the poor the hardest. There was also less time spent on the very few female viewpoint narratives in comparison to the male ones. So yeah, overall, very disappointing.

Do I recommend it? Maybe for fans of the author and of the type of narrative similar to Station Eleven.

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UK Cover Reveal: The Winter Duke by Claire Eliza Bartlett

Tue, 24 Mar 2020 14:18:49 GMT

Today, we are delighted to host the cover reveal for Claire Eliza Bartlett’s The Winter Duke, along with an introduction by the author. Titan Book is bringing it to the UK, publishing the book – a tale of intrigue from the author of the acclaimed feminist fantasy We Rule the Night – on October 13^th.

Without further ado, behold the smugglerific cover:

ABOUT THE BOOK:

She survived the curse. Now she must survive the throne.

All Ekata wants is to stay alive–and the chance to prove herself as a scholar. Once Ekata’s brother is finally named heir to the dukedom of Kylma Above, there will be nothing to keep her at home with her murderous family. Not her books or her experiments, not her family’s icy castle atop a frozen lake, not even the tantalizingly close Kylma Below, a mesmerizing underwater kingdom that provides her family with magic. But just as escape is within reach, her parents and twelve siblings fall under a strange sleeping sickness, and no one can find a cure.

In the space of a single night, Ekata inherits the title of duke, her brother’s captivating warrior bride, and ever-encroaching challengers from without–and within–her ministry. Nothing has prepared Ekata for diplomacy, for war, for love…or for a crown she has never wanted. If Kylma Above is to survive, Ekata must seize her family’s magic and power. And if Ekata is to survive, she must quickly decide how she will wield them both.

AUTHOR INTRO:

Early in the process of writing The Winter Duke, I asked myself a question: could I adapt a favorite fairy tale of mine, The Twelve Dancing Princesses, to a full-length YA fantasy novel?

As it happens, no.

Stories are strange things. Sometimes they spring forth, fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Other times they’re built up, layer by layer, as characters, setting and concepts come together to create something I can’t shake out of my head. Such was the process of The Winter Duke. The first layer was fairy tale, a layer which got embellished and modified so thoroughly it became hard to see which fairy tale, if any, was the original inspiration. But I wanted to keep the fairy tale atmosphere more than anything. That’s where the second layer came in.

For a while I’d been throwing around a concept: the city above and the city below. These two cities were inextricably linked, often mirrored each other, and needed the other to survive. I’d played around with the idea of this city in a couple of different novels, but the plot and characters I devised never lived up to the setting. But when I mentally compared the city Below to the underground realm featured in The Twelve Dancing Princesses, I had a concept that appealed to me very much indeed. Now all I needed to do was populate the novel with some characters, and let them tell their story.

The final piece of the novel came from history. History was my favorite subject in school, and it provides fantastic inspiration for anyone looking to create a complex world or situation in their novel. In the case of The Winter Duke, my inspiration came from reading about the Romanov family. Their brutal infighting led to several instances of regicide and a culture of terror that permeated the court. In other words, it was the perfect atmosphere in which to drop an overly sarcastic, politically disinterested princess who has to manage the snake pit of court without losing herself – or her life – in the process.

Looking back on my initial concept for The Winter Duke, it’s pretty clear that I got sidetracked from The Twelve Dancing Princesses. But building a story up often makes it richer, and I love the way my little fairy tale has turned out. I hope you like it, too.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Claire Eliza Bartlett is a writer and tour guide living in Copenhagen. Her debut novel, We Rule the Night, was described as “electrifying” by Publishers Weekly and “fierce and compelling” by Kirkus, who named it one of their best books of 2019. You can find out more about her on her website authorclaire.com, or find her tweeting @bartlebett

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SOCIAL DISTANCING READS #2: Be Not Far From Me by Mindy McGinnis

Mon, 23 Mar 2020 06:26:05 GMT

Ashley knows a lot of things: she knows that the world is not tame, that people are fallible, that to survive in the forest near her home requires a lot of prep, protection and most of all, attention. Knowing these things don’t prepare her for what happens when she makes a mistake: she gets drunk one night at a camping party with her friends and when she wakes up during the night to pee, she catches her boyfriend making out with another girl – in a drunken stupor, Ashley runs away into the night, into the forest, without her shoes, with anything but her tears and her rage. A fall into a ravine results on a crash and a loss of consciousness for a few previous hours. When she wakes up the next day Ashley realizes she has left no trail to follow back and that she has a severely hurt foot with a lot more bone and tendon on open air DISPLAY than there should be.

Unable to walk on two feet for much long, unable to find the trail back to camp, Ashley finds herself deep in the woods, trying to survive for long enough to fight the looming infection. She has enough knowledge and survival skills to keep going – but for how long before she needs to make a decision about her foot, a decision that could seriously compromise her future as a track athlete on a college scholarship, the only way she has to get out of poverty.

This book was SO tense. SO TENSE. When Ashley inevitably has to deal with her foot, on her own, I could barely continue reading. What’s interesting to me though, is how the story is about survival in many different ways. There is the immediate story around Ashley’s plight in the forest but also a survival story in general: Ashley has so little choice in life in terms of a future to lift her and her father out of poverty, that she has to keep going for as long as possible with a very dangerous and life-threatening wound before deciding to chop off her foot, knowing that doing so will mean so much more to her future. Beyond that, the novel also explores elements of emotional survival, of Ashley’s relationships with her father, her boyfriend (reexamined, of course) and above all, with her mentor, a young man who once walked into the forest and never came back. Ashley is tough as nails and an inspiring, sympathetic protagonist I loved to follow all the way through to the happy ending.

A recommended read: tense enough to be thrilling and rewarding enough not to be a downer.

The post SOCIAL DISTANCING READS #2: Be Not Far From Me by Mindy McGinnis appeared first on The Book Smugglers.

Social Distancing Reads #1: Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

Wed, 18 Mar 2020 12:37:45 GMT

Alix is a successful, white blogger/social media minor celebrity whose brand is about self-confidence. Alix has two kids, a huge house and a loving husband. Her biggest problem is scaling her business in a way that stays true to herself.

Emira is a 25 year-old black woman who is about to be kick-off her parents’ health insurance, who is more of less broke working two jobs to keep afloat while she decides what she wants to do for the rest of her life. One of jobs is as a babysitter to Alix’s daughter Briar, whom she adores.

One night, while babysitting, Emira takes Briar grocery shopping and is stopped by a security guard who accuses Emira of kidnapping Briar. While the situation is handled fairly easily with Alix’s husband coming to the rescue, the occurrence starts a chain of events when Alix decides to “help” and “guide” Emira, as a “friend” and even, potentially, as a member of the “family”.

This novel is a great study of perspective and privilege – the chapters alternate between the two characters and it sheds light on how both interact with the world differently, how they respond to the events at the grocery shop and subsequent developments. There is a super great social commentary here as well as rich character development for both women but especially Emira whose genuine love for her work and for Briar is constantly looked down by other people (even her friends) as “not enough”. The novel which has a deceiving lightness to it, offers a scathing look at how well-meaning white people can and often do silence the ones at the receiving end of their sympathy specially in these times of the “woke” movement.

A recommended read – pair it with the equally excellent Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams. I listened to the audiobook and it was fab.

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Cover reveal and excerpt: MACHINE by Elizabeth Bear

Mon, 16 Mar 2020 13:00:48 GMT

Today we are delighted to be hosting the exclusive reveal of Elizabeth Bear’s upcoming new novel Machine. Out from Saga Press in October this year, Machine is for space opera fans of Becky Chambers and Alex White and is set in the White Space series. As we wait (in)patiently, here is the cover and an excerpt to keep us going.

Behold, the smugglerific cover:

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Meet Doctor Jens. Doctor Jens hasn’t had a decent cup of coffee in fifteen years.

Her job begins when she jumps out of perfectly good space ships. It continues with developing treatments for sick aliens of species she’s never seen before. She loves her life. Even without the coffee.

But Dr. Jens is about to discover an abiding mystery: two ships, one ancient and one new, locked in a dangerous embrace. A mysterious crew suffering from an even more mysterious ailment. A shipmind trapped in an inadequate body, much of her memory pared away. A murderous meme from out of time. Unfortunately, Dr. Jens can’t resist a mystery. And so she is about to discover that everything she’s dedicated her life to… is a lie.

THE EXCERPT:

Chapter 1

I STOOD IN THE DOOR AND LOOKED DOWN.

Down wasn’t the right word, exactly. But it also wasn’t exactly the wrong word. All directions were down from the airlock where I stood,

and almost all of them were an infinitely long fall.

I wasn’t only staring into bottomless space. I was aiming: aiming at a target that wheeled sickeningly less than a klick away. My own perch was also revolving around a central core, simulating a half a g or so, just to keep things interesting.

I was standing in the airlock door because I was going to jump. Just as soon as I got my bearings and my timing.

I don’t get to be afraid now. I get to be afraid before and I get to be afraid after. But I don’t get to be afraid during.

There’s no room during for being afraid. So I have to fold the fear up. Tuck it out of sight and get on with all the important things I was doing.

In this case, saving lives and making history. In that order of priority and the reverse order of chronology.

I hoped to be saving lives, anyway, if I got lucky and there were still some lives on the other side of my jump to save.

Across that gulf of vacuum lay the ancient ship we pursued. It wasn’t far, by space travel standards. A few hundred meters, and it seemed like less, because Big Rock Candy Mountain was thousands of meters in diameter.

I say ship. But what I was looking at was an enormous wheel whip- ping around its hub as if rolling through space. It was a station orbiting no primary; an endless scroll of hull unreeling—subjectively speaking, because on my own ship I felt like I was standing still—in a spring-curl spiral twisting around us.

Not a smooth hull, but a rocky and pockmarked one. One punctured by micrometeors and crumpled by sheer stresses. With bits of structure projecting from the surface at varied angles and its cerulean and gold paint frayed by unfiltered ultraviolet and abraded by space dust.

Big Rock Candy Mountain was old.

About six hundred ans old, to be as precise as I could without run- ning a lot of fussy conversions in my head. She’d come from Terra in the pre-white-drive era, and over the centians she had built up tremendous velocity.

She was zipping along at a solid fraction of the speed of light, out here in the dark places between the stars, much farther from home than she could have possibly been, her course no longer anything like the orig- inal plot retrieved by Core archinformists.

Maybe she’d gotten lost, or an impact that had caused some of the damage to her hull had knocked her off course. Or maybe the people who had outfitted her had lied about where they planned to go. The era of Terra’s history that had spawned sublight interstellar exploration and the gener- ation ships had not been one of trust and peaceful cooperation between peoples. More one of desperate gambles and bloody-nailed survival.

Only one generation ship had ever reached a destination as far as his- tory was aware, and that hadn’t ended well. We were here because this one had sent out a distress signal, and a Synarche ship, tracing it, had found her. And sent out a data packet requesting assistance on Big Rock Candy Mountain’s behalf.

The Synarche ship had not been in contact since, which was disconcerting. And its locator beacon, and Big Rock Candy Mountain’s distress signal, were still beeping away down there. And so we were here: to see if we could rescue anybody. If there was anybody left to rescue.

It didn’t look promising. The ship behind us was another ambulance, but the one after that contained a team of archaeologists and archinform- ists, and I had an unsettling premonition that there was going to be a lot more useful work for them to do than for us. I wasn’t sure exactly how far behind us they were, but I expected we were on our own for at least five to ten diar. The rescue could not afford to wait for backup.

There could be people alive in there. We had to proceed as if there were, until we had proven otherwise. But they’d done nothing to acknowl- edge our approach, and they had not responded to hails on the same frequencies as their distress beacon.

I couldn’t have preconceptions, because I couldn’t afford to miss any- one who might be alive. Nevertheless, contemplating the vast ruin before me made me feel sad. Worse, it was that creeping, satisfying sadness you get when you look on a ruin: at something long destroyed, something lost that isn’t your problem.

My own ship, Synarche Medical Vessel I Race To Seek the Living, was an ambulance associated with Core General. She had spent nearly a stan- dard month with her modern engines burning fuel recklessly to match velocity with Big Rock Candy Mountain. Sally—as we called her—was fast, maneuverable, and had outsize sublight engines for her mass. She also had an Alcubierre-White drive for FTL travel, though since it didn’t impart any actual velocity to the ship, it couldn’t be used to chase down quarry in normal space. We’d had to slingshot the big gravity well at our origin point in the Core to accelerate, then conserve momentum through the transition in order to catch the speeding generation ship. I say “slingshot” like it was a routine maneuver. In reality, there’s noth- ing quite like staring into the most enormous black hole in the galaxy, then flying right down its gullet like a gnat with attitude. (Inasmuch as anybody can stare into an actual black hole with their actual eyes unless they belong to one of the exotic species that can visualize X-rays or radio waves.)

So we’d already had one adventure leaving the Core, and now here we were. We weren’t docking with Big Rock Candy Mountain. We had no information about the structural integrity of this antique hulk, but com- mon sense suggested it would be fragile. Unbalancing it, subjecting it to the stresses of docking—both were terrible ideas. We’d have to use one of our adaptable docking collars, anyway, because the idea that our hardware and theirs would be compatible was laughable.

That’s why I was jumping.

It was not as dangerous as it probably seems. I’m Sally’s rescue spe- cialist: getting people out of dangerous situations is my job, and I do this sort of thing frequently.

The insertion can be dicey, though.

My hardsuit had jets, so I had maneuverability. And everything in space is moving incredibly fast anyway, so what matters is the relative velocity. If you and I are moving at the same speed in the same direction and there’s nothing else around us, we’re functionally not moving.

Space has a whole lot of nothing. If I jumped at the right time, and corrected for Sally’s rotation, all I had to do was match velocity with the wheel and snug down onto it.

It was still breathtaking to stand inside that open airlock and look down. Sally had the processing power to hold a position over, or rather outside, Big Rock Candy Mountain basically forever. But Big Rock Candy Mountain was spinning, and one or two of her enormous central cables had snapped over the centians, so her spin had developed a wobble.

She was also wobbling for a more disturbing reason. There was a ship docked to the outside of her ring. One with white drives—a modern ship. A fast packet crewed by methane breathers: the one that had relayed the dis- tress signal. Its—his, I checked my fox—name was Synarche Packet Vessel I Bring Tidings From Afar. Why in the Well he had docked with an ox ship, what he was still doing coupled to it, and why he wasn’t answering hails was a series of mysteries for which there was no answer in Sally’s databases.

And Sally, being a rescue vessel, has extremely comprehensive databases.

“Sally,” I asked my faceplate, “how’s our telemetry?”

“Pretty good, Llyn,” the shipmind answered.“We’ve matched velocity and vector, and we’re stable. Can’t do much about that spin.”

Good to know I wasn’t the only one worried about it.

“I’m in the door,” I said, which she already knew. But you’re supposed to maintain a verbal narrative. For the flight recorders and in case anything goes wrong and your crewmates don’t notice what you’re doing. It also lets them keep an eye on your checklists so nothing gets forgotten. Safety first. “Where’s Tsosie?”

His voice came through. “At the other door. Ready to go on your word, Llyn.”

He was the ambulance’s commander and senior trauma specialist, but I was the rescue specialist and this was my op. Rhym, our flight surgeon, outranked both of us as far as Core General seniority was concerned, but right now I was in charge of them, too. If we had to go to surgery, Rhym would become the authority figure.

It wouldn’t have made sense in a military outfit, so it had taken a while for me to get used to the way command shifted between team mem- bers. But it made sense for Sally.

“In three,” I said, and that many moments later we were sailing across the space between Sally and Big Rock Candy Mountain. As I stabilized, the apparent spiral of the generation ship smoothed out into a wheel so unnervingly that I wanted to slap a topologist.

Tsosie and I would have been a matched set, but Tsosie was trailing the sled that contained rescue supplies, portable airlocks, a laser cutting torch, and autostretchers. I had four drones limpeted onto my back beside the air tanks.

You can send back for stuff. But that takes time. Time isn’t always something you have when responding to an incident. We’re told to adapt, improvise, overcome. Perform the mission.

That part is not so different from what I did in the Judiciary. You do the thing that gets the correct result—within legal and ethical limits— and you fill out the paperwork later.

I like my job.

Sally fed me the telemetry through senso. Both Tsosie and I had jumped well. We used our jets to add v, so it seemed as if Sally were drop- ping behind while the turning wheel underneath us slowed. Soon, we were stationary relative to the surface, using our jets only to continue to course-correct into the curve of the ship’s habitation ring as we began to close the distance to it. We needed to get low, relatively speaking, because Sally would be coming around again soon.

“That looks like a decent spot,” Tsosie said, picking it out for me in the senso feed.

I studied the highlighted patch. It was flat and there were grab loops. I couldn’t see an airlock hatch, but some of the handholds and what I assumed were tether safeties led toward the interior surface of the wheel. You get a good sense of ship design in my business. I’d put airlocks there, where you wouldn’t have to deal with centripetal force on the way out or in. “Let’s go around the corner,” I said. As soon as we touched the ship,

the spin would start trying to throw us off. This was easier.

Tsosie followed my lead.

The inside surface of the wheel reminded me of the plated underbelly of some kind of legless lizardmorph. It was slightly concave, and though the concavity was a little uneven due to the broken cables, I assumed it had been intentional. Anything that made running around on the outside of your ship a little less profoundly hazardous was good. You never know when you’ll need to go outside and fix a lightsail or something, and space is awfully big.

Lose track of your ship for a few moments and you might never find it again.

We touched down lightly. Our mag boots latched onto the hull, and suddenly we were standing comfortably under about a third of a g.

Tsosie looked over and grinned at me through the faceplate.“Smooth.” He crouched down. “Do you know what I hate?” he continued, running his gauntlets over the hull.

“Do I care what you hate?” I asked.

“I hate it when you take a shit, right? And at the end of it there’s this little hard nodule—no, splinter, this little hard splinter of poo, all by its lonesome. And, you know, there’s no bowel movement behind it to push it out. It’s stranded there in your sphincter, and you can feel it but there’s nothing civilized you can do to get it out.”

“This conversation is being recorded.” He shrugged.

“You could eat a carrot.” I lowered my head over the readouts on the backs of my hardsuit gloves.

“A what?”

“Carrot,” I said. “A sugary, edible root.”

“What’s that supposed to do, push it out the other end?”

“Nah,” I said. Then, “Well, sort of. If you’re experiencing hard little pellet feces, you’re constipated because you’re either dehydrated, or because you’re not getting enough fiber. Or both. Carrots have water and fiber. Eat carrots and you’ll get nice clean poops. If we lived on a planet, I’d tell you about apples—”

“What’s an apple?”

“What you eat every dia to keep the doctor away,” I said.“At least if your problem is an impacted bowel. Of course, if we kept doctors away, neither one of us would have anybody to talk to Oh, look. There’s the airlock.”

I walked toward it, boots clomping with each step. I could hear it through the contact with the hull and the atmosphere inside my hardsuit.

Tsosie followed. “Are you okay, Jens? You look kinda grayish.”

It was taking a fair amount of concentration not to wobble as I walked.“Food is not sitting so well.”

Tsosie grinned at me. He didn’t turn his faceplate toward me, but I could feel it through the senso.“I guess the potty talk isn’t helping.”

“I’m wearing too many ayatanas.” I had half a dozen recorded mem- ory packets from various individuals loaded into my fox: drawing on their expertise for any clues about how to communicate with or help either the ancient humans that might be inside Big Rock Candy Mountain, or the methane-breathing systers aboard the docked, modern ship.

It was a plausible excuse for walking funny, anyway.

The airlock was a manual one, dogged with a wheel. The wheel was stiff with age and lack of maintenance, but I wear an exo for medical rea- sons. Between me, the exo, and the hardsuit’s servos I got the thing to grind free without having to throw myself on Tsosie’s mercy. I like to do things for myself, because I haven’t always been able to.

It makes me appreciate the small things. Such as being able to turn a sticky wheel.

“Deploying bubble,” Tsosie said.

I gave the wheel a turn or two, but didn’t undog it completely until Tsosie had set the bubble up, adhering the rim to Big Rock Candy Moun- tain’s hull. It wasn’t a full airlock. Once it was installed the only way out was to cut the membrane. But we had no way to gauge whether the air- lock behind the hatch was pressurized, or even intact. Or if the interior door was open. We could explosively decompress part of the generation ship, if we weren’t careful.

There was a thing that might be a pressure gauge. The crystal over it was cracked, and if you squinted past the cracks the needle inside lay flat against one peg. If I was reading the archaic numerals right the needle rested on the depressurized side. That was a good sign for avoiding explosive decompression, if it was accurate: nothing inside to decompress.

It might be a bad sign for anybody inside the generation ship, though.

Sensible airlock design provided for a safety interlock such that one could not open both hatches at the same time. You probably wouldn’t be surprised by how often people—even modern rightminded people, even nonhuman people—fail to do what’s sensible. I wasn’t prepared to assume that unrightminded folks from the distant past—desperate enough to light out for stars even their great-grandchildren would never see, while flying the spacefaring equivalent of a very large, leaky rowboat—would be notably cautious individuals.

I checked Tsosie’s work on the bubble, which was as meticulous as ever. I was having a bad pain dia, so I tuned a little to control it. Not too much, though. Being dopey feels gross, and depressing your reflexes is a terrible idea when you’re entering a rescue zone.

Okay, maybe the ayatanas weren’t the only reason I was looking a little gray.

While I was adjusting, Tsosie finished opening the hatch. No air puffed out. It looked like the gauge was working after all. Or was maybe accidentally correct. There was a ladder inside the aperture. He climbed down and I followed, closing the hatch behind me.

“We’re in,” I told Sally. “Looks like an airlock should.”

The second hatch was off to my right as I stepped off the ladder. The space was large enough for six space-suited humans—or two humans and a large piece of equipment—and utterly barren. The bulkheads were a dingy beige, the paint scuffed with bumps and rubs. The ship had stayed functional and in use for some time after launch, then. But either the ship, the management, or the crew had not been functional enough for metic- ulous maintenance to be the norm.

I wondered how many generations had managed to live and die here. I wondered again if there were still people on board. I wondered if they had triggered the distress beacon, and if so, when.

What leads you to put a beacon on a ship that never plans on encountering another of its kind?

I knew less time had elapsed on this ship than for those of us who stayed home and joined the Synarche. Big Rock Candy Mountain was moving so fast after centians of acceleration that she had attained relativistic speeds. Every standard second we spent here was one point three standard seconds out in the rest of the universe.

Not a big difference, if you only stayed a week. It would mean roughly two extra diar going by in the outside galaxy. But over the course of half a millennian, the time dilation added up.

The pressure gauge in the inside hatch was more legible. It read .83, and since it maxed out at 1, I guessed that meant Terran atmospheres.

Tsosie and I took turns spraying each other’s hardsuits with decontam. We were the same species as the people who built this creaking, ancient vessel, but—in the thrilling eventuality that any were still alive— we and they were six hundred ans separated. Our microbes would eat their immune systems for lunch, and vice versa. It would be an enormous tragedy to reconnect with a lost branch of humanity only to start a pan- demic and kill everybody on both sides.

So we wouldn’t do that.

“What we could learn from this place,” Tsosie breathed.

He let the pressure equalize, and suddenly I could hear the creaks and groans of the ancient ship around me. Strained metal and some distant thumps that sounded like the ring of machinery. No voices, and nothing that sounded like voices.

I thought I had been keeping my hopes down, but my spirits still fell. I wasn’t feeling particularly good about our chances of finding survivors. We had not been subtle about our approach—it doesn’t do to sneak up on people—and if anyone was still driving this thing, surely they would have answered our hails. Radio was radio. Or they would have come to meet us at the airlock, or at least sent a bot.

Artificial intelligences dated back to before the Eschaton, and Sally’s data library suggested that most of the generation ships had shipminds of a sort. Wheelminds? I didn’t even know what nomenclature you’d use for a ship this big.

Nobody spoke to us, even when I said the ship’s name out loud, amplifying it through my hardsuit speaker, and requested permission to enter.

Well, maybe somebody was on the other side of the hatch.

Tsosie tipped his head and dipped his shoulder, the broadly expressive gestures of somebody used to communicating through a hardsuit. “Here goes nothing.”

“Give it your best,” I said, and watched him lean on the hatch wheel.

Tsosie swung the hatch wide, and—nothing happened.

Nothing besides a brief puff of equalizing air, that is. I hadn’t really expected a welcome party, but it would have been a nice surprise.

“Huh,” he said, peering around the hatch.“Well, that’s interesting.”

That’s not a reassuring thing to hear when you’ve just broken into a space ship older than your species’s membership in civilization. I leaned sideways to peer over his shoulder.

The entire corridor was filled with what seemed at first to be a strange sort of honeycomb or spiderweb. The illumination was working—not something I would have counted on, after all this time. Let’s hear it for good old-fashioned fusion reactors.

Because the ship spun like a station to simulate gravity, we were standing on the bulkhead that faced the outside of the wheel. Big Rock Candy Mountain was enormous, and I could see quite far down the corridor before the curve of the ship bent out of sight in the distance. The whole space seemed filled with . . . building toys?

Something very similar, anyway, to the sort of peg-and-keeper sets that children of many species with manual dexterity are normally given as they begin to develop curiosity and the ability to use their fingers independently. If they happen to have fingers. These seemed to be printed or extruded in polymer and plated in what I took to be a conductive material of a shimmering, holographic metal. The whole structure created a mesh of interlocking hexagons that entirely filled the passageway.

“Structural reinforcement?” I asked, making sure we still had a connection back to our ship.

“It might be,” Sally agreed. I could feel her relaying Tsosie’s feed—and my feed—to the other four members of the crew. Loese, our new pilot; Hhayazh, a flight nurse; Rhym, the flight surgeon; and Camphvis, the other flight nurse.

It seemed like we were all equally mystified. We’d sent two out of the three Terrans in the crew (Loese was the other one) on this trip out of caution. We couldn’t expect any survivors aboard Big Rock Candy Mountain to have ever encountered a nonhuman sentience. And Hhayazh, in particular, is the sort of twiggy, bristle-covered, black-carapaced insectoid sentience that gives groundlubbers the shrieking jimjams.

Nobody was going to have the shrieking jimjams on my watch if I could possibly help it.

These structures didn’t seem sinister. They refracted light in bright, human colors. Not all primary—purple and orange and green made appearances—but all true and saturated. Kid colors, accentuating their resemblance to toys.

“There’s too many colors for it to be a DNA model,” Tsosie said. “Unless the same amino acids are wearing different dresses.”

I reached past him, and poked the nearest peg with my finger, causing him to gasp and grab my wrist an instant too late to stop me.

Poor life choices got me into this line of work: What can I say?

I didn’t really expect it to react. But I guess I should say that I poked at the nearest peg with my finger, because the whole structure peeled away from my hardsuit before I touched it and rippled with a series of whick-whick-whicking sounds into a folded configuration against the walls of the corridor. It left more than enough room for Tsosie and me to walk side by side.

“If we go in there it’s going to reassemble itself right through our bodies, isn’t it?” Tsosie asked.

“Maybe it’s shy.” I stepped past him, out into the corridor. He let go of my wrist as soon as I started to move. It had been a warning gesture, not a real attempt to restrain me.

Not that he could have. I was the one on the crew with the law enforcement background. And the adaptive exoskeleton under my hard- suit, giving me boosted reflexes and strength.

I paused briefly, and the tinkertoys didn’t nail me into place like a shrike’s victim. That was a good sign. I reached out again, and they peeled away from me again.

“Seems safe,” I said.

Tsosie made a little choking noise. But he followed me, boots clomping only a little. We were both, I noticed, making an effort to walk softly. It’s always hard when you first get back under grav—or simulated grav—not to crash around like one of the elephantine high-gravity systers in a proverbial china shop. The toys continued to peel apart ahead of us, and sealed themselves back up behind.“Maybe they are structural reinforcement.”

“Microbots,” Tsosie said, bending closer to inspect some of them.

“Only big.”

“Where do you get the raw material to make this many . . . microbots? After six hundred ans in space, anyway?”

“Excellent question,” Sally said. “Keep exploring.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Elizabeth Bear won the John W. Campbell award for Best New Writer in 2005 and has since published fifteen novels and numerous short stories. She writes in both the science fiction and fantasy genres and has won critical acclaim in both. She has won the Hugo Award more than once. She lives in Massachusetts. Visit her on Twitter @Matociquala.

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