50 of the Best

Fri 20 Aug 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Sofia Samatar| Posted by: Gavin

We’re delighted to see Sofia Samatar’s two Olondria novels included in NPR’s big fun list — how many have you read?

We Asked, You Answered: Your 50 Favorite Sci-Fi And Fantasy Books Of The Past Decade

In Olondria, you can smell the ocean wind coming off the page, soldiers ride birds, angels haunt humans, and written dreams are terribly dangerous. “Have you ever seen something so beautiful that you’d be content to just sit and watch the light around it change for a whole day because every passing moment reveals even more unbearable loveliness and transforms you in ways you can’t articulate?” asks judge Amal El-Mohtar. “You will if you read these books.”

Which reminds me it was also on a big list last year:  Time Magazine 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time

“This slowly-unraveling, exquisitely-detailed novel made the poet Sofia Samatar a World Fantasy Award winner and a Nebula Award finalist. It follows Jevick, a young writer who is obsessed with the fantastical, distant world of Olondria, where his father is a merchant. But when Jevick is called there after he inherits the family business, he becomes haunted by a ghost—and is unwittingly pulled into Olondria’s power struggle. The novel unfolds in waves of A Game of Thrones-level twists, all while its fantastical world-building pulls from South Asian, Middle Eastern and African cultures to offer a welcome departure from Eurocentric fantasy.”

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Vandana Singh, Climate Imagination Fellow

Tue 17 Aug 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., climate change, Vandana Singh| Posted by: Gavin

I was delighted to see via Locus that Vandana Singh (author of Ambiguity Engines among others) is one of 4 new Climate Imagination Fellows, hosted by the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. The fellowship “seeks to inspire a wave of narratives about what positive climate futures might look like for communities around the world.”

I have Xia Jia’s collection from the Clarkesworld Kickstarter but the other 2 writers are new to me:

• Libia Brenda is a writer, editor and translator based in Mexico City. She writes speculative fiction as well as nonfiction and criticism about science fiction and fantastic literature. Her work has been translated from Spanish into English, Italian and Portuguese. She is one of the co-founders of the Cúmulo de Tesla collective, a multidisciplinary working group that promotes dialogue between the arts and sciences, with a special focus on science fiction; and Mexicona: Imagination and Future, a series of Spanish-language conversations about the future and speculative literature from Mexico and other planets. She was the first Mexican woman to be nominated for a Hugo Award for the bilingual and bicultural anthology “A Larger Reality/Una realidad más amplia.” After that, she was so excited that she edited “A Timeline in Which We Don’t Go Extinct,” a bilingual anthology that is also a video game, which is free to download and play. She edited the Mexico special issue of the speculative fiction magazine “Strange Horizons,” published in November 2020.

• Xia Jia is a speculative fiction author and associate professor of Chinese literature at Xi’an Jiaotong University in Xi’an, a city in the Shaanxi province in northwest China. Seven of her short stories have won the Galaxy Award, China’s most prestigious science fiction award. She has published a fantasy novel, “Odyssey of China Fantasy: On the Road” (2009), and four collections of science fiction stories: “The Demon-Enslaving Flask” (2012), “A Time Beyond Your Reach” (2017), “Xi’an City Is Falling Down” (2018), and “A Summer Beyond Your Reach” (2020), her first collection in English. Her stories have appeared in English translation in Nature and Clarkesworld magazine. Her nonfiction academic collection, “Coordinates of the Future: Discussions on Chinese Science Fiction in the Age of Globalization,” was published in 2019. She is also involved in science fiction research, translation, screenwriting, editing and teaching creative writing and is currently working on a new science fiction book, titled “Chinese Encyclopedia.”

• Hannah Onoguwe is a writer of fiction and nonfiction based in Yenagoa, Bayelsa State in southern Nigeria, a region famous for its oil industry. Her short stories have been published in the anthologies “Imagine Africa 500” (2016), from Pan African Publishers, and “Strange Lands Short Stories” (2020), from Flame Tree Press. Her work has appeared in publications including Adanna, The Drum Literary Magazine, Omenana, Brittle Paper, The Stockholm Review and Timeworn Literary Journal. In 2014, “Cupid’s Catapult,” her collection of short stories, was one of 10 manuscripts chosen to kick off the Nigerian Writers Series, an imprint of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA). She won the ANA Poetry Competition in 2016 and was shortlisted for the Afritondo Short Story Prize in 2020. She holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Ibadan and a master’s degree in organizational psychology from the University of Jos. She works at a software company, providing support for the Nigeria Immigration Service.

• Vandana Singh is an author of speculative fiction, a professor of physics at Framingham State University and an interdisciplinary researcher on the climate crisis. She is the author of two short story collections, “The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories” (2014) and “Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories” (2018), the second of which was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. In 2014, she traveled to the Alaskan North Shore to create a case study on climate change for undergraduate education as part of a program award from the American Association of Colleges and Universities. Her work on a justice-centered, transdisciplinary conceptualization of the climate crisis is part of a forthcoming volume from UNESCO, “Charting an SDG 4.7 Roadmap for Radical, Transformative Change in the Midst of Climate Breakdown.” Her short fiction has been widely published, including the short story “Widdam,” part of the interdisciplinary climate-themed collection “A Year Without a Winter” (2019). She was born and brought up in New Delhi and now lives near Boston.

It is quite an exciting program. The fellows will write short fiction, short flash fictions, and essays and so on to be collected in a Climate Action Almanac next year. They also will be doing workshops around the world including the countdown summit to COP 26 in Scotland later this year.

Congratulations to Vandana and all the Fellows. Looking forward to seeing what they do.

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Read Liyana on Lithub

Mon 16 Aug 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Zen Cho| Posted by: Gavin

Lithub just dropped an excerpt from Zen Cho’s story “Liyana” — read it in the book or check it out here.

Recent notes about the book can be found in the infinite pages of Bustle

“A must-read book for any sci-fi or fantasy fan.”

and Buzzfeed:

“These 19 science fiction and fantasy short stories infused with Malaysian folklore are absolutely gorgeous. Originally published in 2014, before Zen Cho’s debut fantasy, Sorcerer to the Crown, it is now being published by Small Beer Press with nine additional stories. In her Hugo Award–winning novelette ‘If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again,’ an imugi who wishes to ascend to full dragonhood has its plan thwarted by a human girl taking a selfie. In ‘The House of Aunts,’ a teenage pontianak (sorta like a vampire) lives with her overbearing female relatives and attends school, where she tries to hide her food choices from her crush. Just as with her novels, Cho merges humor and relatable characters with delightful prose and engaging storylines.”

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Here, There, and Everywhere

Tue 10 Aug 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

I’ve been looking forward to this day for a while as it’s the publication day for our expanded edition of Zen Cho’s collection Spirits Abroad. The book was originally published a few years ago and was a co-winner of the Crawford Award. I hadn’t read it until more recently when it came across my desk with nine additional stories including the Hugo Award winner — and such a good story! — “If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again.”

We were a bit late with getting the cover finalized but when it came in from Wesley Allsbrook we were over the moon, what a cracker! The book is about as much fun as can be with the whole gamut of stories, running from here, there, to everywhere.

The book is available everywhere in print, audio, and ebook. Dive in!

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Spirits Abroad

Tue 10 Aug 2021 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 352 pages · $17 · 9781618731869 | ebook · 9781618731876
2nd printing: December 2022

LA Times Ray Bradbury Prize winner
Locus Award finalist

A new expanded edition of Zen Cho’s award-winning debut collection.

Nineteen sparkling stories that weave between the lands of the living and the lands of the dead. Spirits Abroad is an expanded edition of Zen Cho’s Crawford Award winning debut collection with twelve added stories including Hugo Award winner “If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again.” A Datin recalls her romance with an orang bunian. A teenage pontianak struggles to balance homework, bossy aunties, first love, and eating people. An earth spirit gets entangled in protracted negotiations with an annoying landlord, and Chang E spins off into outer space, the ultimate metaphor for the Chinese diaspora.

Read an interview on Electric Lit: On Writing Fantasy Inspired by Malaysian Chinese Folklore

Read a story: 七星鼓 (Seven Star Drum)

Reviews & Praise

“A must-read book for any sci-fi or fantasy fan.”
— Bustle

“These 19 science fiction and fantasy short stories infused with Malaysian folklore are absolutely gorgeous. Originally published in 2014, before Zen Cho’s debut fantasy, Sorcerer to the Crown, it is now being published by Small Beer Press with nine additional stories. In her Hugo Award–winning novelette ‘If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again,’ an imugi who wishes to ascend to full dragonhood has its plan thwarted by a human girl taking a selfie. In ‘The House of Aunts,’ a teenage pontianak (sorta like a vampire) lives with her overbearing female relatives and attends school, where she tries to hide her food choices from her crush. Just as with her novels, Cho merges humor and relatable characters with delightful prose and engaging storylines.”
—Margaret Kingsbury, Buzzfeed

“The first iteration of Zen Cho’s Spirits Abroad came out a few years ago, but this new collection is bigger and bolder, including the delightful ‘If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again,’ which won a Hugo Award.”
— Washington Post

“The most stylistically adventurous, even ex­perimental stories are included in the final sec­tion, ‘Elsewhere’, in which supernatural figures may be the main characters – a minor earth spirit narrates ‘The Earth Spirit’s Favorite Anecdote’, while a tricksterish Monkey King confronts a quite traditional Faerie Queen in ‘Monkey King, Faerie Queen’. My favorite story here is also the only one in the book which hints at science fiction. In ‘The Four Generations of Chang E’, the title character escapes a nightmarish, dying Earth by winning a lottery to migrate to a moon colony, where she learns to live with moon rabbits and eventually has herself surgically altered into a Moonite with ‘long, ovoid eyes.’ She never escapes family responsibilities, though, and, after her mother dies, returns to Earth with the ashes. There she gains an insight that seems to haunt several of Cho’s stories, including perhaps Black Water Sister: ‘Past a certain point, you stop being able to go home. At this point, when you have got this far from where you were from, the thread snaps. The narrative breaks. And you are forced, pastless, motherless, selfless, to invent yourself anew.’ The tension on that thread of narrative, which adds subtle meaning to the title Spirits Abroad, is what gives Cho’s short fiction, even at its wittiest, a kind of haunting – and haunted – sensibility.”
— Gary K. Wolfe, Locus

“Highly recommended for those interested in well-written fantasy fiction outside of the post-Tolkien mold.”
— Booklist (starred review)

“Powerful but subtle magic woven into the fabric of intricate worlds make Cho a sure favorite for readers of Kelly Link and Carmen Maria Machado.”
— Publishers Weekly

“A collection of speculative stories that play on Malaysian folklore and fantasy tropes with humor and compassion. . . . The stories are told with the precise and almost sparse voice of fairy tales. . . . the collection’s most moving stories harness seamless worldbuilding, intriguing character development, and thematic complexity. A swath of delightful and intricate stories from a wildly inventive storyteller.”
— Kirkus Reviews

“Sorcerer to the Crown author Zen Cho writes stories that slide easily between genres, and characters who hop nimbly between our world of banal bustle and a supernatural world that often seems just as annoying. This collection of ten stories, originally published in 2014 by Buku Fixi and the joint winner of 2015’s IAFA William L. Crawford Fantasy Award, is now being re-issued by Small Beer Press, and gives us new takes on ancient lore—especially the tales of Malaysia.
“A vampiric teen pontianak finds it hard to keep up with her schoolwork and her constant need to feed upon people. The moon goddess Chang E heads further into outer space—but is it in a spirit of adventure or to get away from Earth? An elderly Datin looks back at her failed love affair with an orang bunian, a type of spirit who would normally favor a deep forest or mountain home to avoid humans. Cho’s stories look at the intersection of those mundane and uncanny worlds—and the ways life among the humans can drive the spirit to distraction.”
— Leah Schnelbach, BookMarks, The Most Anticipated Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books of 2021

“Zen Cho’s stories manage the rare and precious feat of being smart, witty, wise, horrific, and comforting all at once.” — Kate Elliott author of Unconquerable Sun

“An excellent collection.” — Abigail Nussbaum, Strange Horizons

Table of Contents

Here

The First Witch of Damansara
The Guest
The Fish Bowl
First National Forum on the Position of Minorities in Malaysia
Odette
The House of Aunts
Balik Kampung

There

One-Day Travelcard for Fairyland
起狮, 行礼 (Rising Lion—The Lion Bows)
七星鼓 (Seven Star Drum)
The Mystery of the Suet Swain
Prudence and the Dragon
The Perseverance of Angela’s Past Life
If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again

Elsewhere

The Earth Spirit’s Favorite Anecdote
Monkey King, Faerie Queen
Liyana
The Terra-cotta Bride
The Four Generations of Chang E

Praise for Zen Cho’s Books:

“An enchanting cross between Georgette Heyer and Susannah Clarke, full of delights and surprises. Zen Cho unpins the edges of the canvas and throws them wide.” — Naomi Novik, New York Times bestselling author of A Deadly Education

“A warm, funny debut novel by a brilliant new talent.” — Charles Stross, award-winning author of the Laundry Files and Merchant Princes series

“Fabulous! If you like Austen or Patrick O’Brian, or magic and humor like Susanna Clarke, or simply a very fun read, you will really, really, enjoy this!” — Ann Leckie, Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke Award winning author of Ancillary Justice

“Zen Cho’s SORCERER TO THE CROWN is inventive, dangerous, brilliant, unsettling, and adorable, all at the same time. It shatters as many rules as its characters do. Historical Britain will never be the same again, and I can’t wait for the next book.” — Courtney Milan, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author

“A deliciously true tale of politics and power in a charming, cruel world — it demands and deserves to be read again and again. Cho has humor and flair to match Pratchett and Heyer plus her own marvelous style.” — Karen Lord, award-winning author of The Best of All Possible Worlds

“A delightful and enchanting novel that uses sly wit and assured style to subvert expectations while it always, unfailingly, entertains. I loved it!” — Kate Elliott, author of the Spiritwalker series

“Magic, manners and dragons in Regency England — this alone would be awesome, but Zen Cho adds a veneer of comment on English colonial politics …. Like a mix of Jane Austen, PG Wodehouse, and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and all its own thing. Glorious.” — Aliette de Bodard, award-winning author of Obsidian and Blood and The House of Shattered Wings

“A sheer delight from beginning to end. Cho perfectly conjures the opulence, absurdity and conflict of the period.” — Samantha Shannon, author of The Bone Season

“A delightful follow-up to Sorcerer to the Crown! Cho applies her characteristic wit and charm to a tale of cursed sisters — a story I found as enchanting as her Faerie Court.” — S.A. Chakraborty, author of City of Brass

“Cho continues to confront class and gender roles in an alternate Regency England while showcasing entertaining prose and characters. A delightful historical-fantasy novel that will capture readers in its layered story line.”—Booklist

“Reading the clever deployment of weaponized manners never gets old; in Cho’s charming prose, The True Queen weaves a very pleasant spell indeed.” — NPR

“A winning combination of magic and thrill set in an alternative version of Regency England.” — Washington Post

“A captivating debut that, aside from examining both gender and racial prejudice, tells an entertaining story with wit and consummate skill.” — The Guardian (UK)

“Fans of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell will flock to this historical fantasy debut for its shared setting and be rewarded with an exciting story and nuanced, diverse characters who make this novel soar on its own merits.” — Library Journal (starred review; debut of the month)

“Combines magic and the Regency period in the manner of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, but adds an Austenian piquancy . . . Cho’s debut has much to recommend it, particularly its implicit critique of colonialism and its frothy good humour.”— Financial Times

“A classic, gently barbed upper-crust comedy mixed with magical thrills, modern social consciousness, and a hint of political intrigue. A decidedly promising start.”— Kirkus Reviews

“Zacharias brings to mind another orphaned young wizard whose combination of grit and melancholy captured readers’ hearts, and ingenious, gutsy Prunella simply shines.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Sorcerer to the Crown exceeds expectations. It’s a very entertaining and deeply enjoyable novel—and if this is what Cho gives us for her debut, I’m really looking forward to seeing what she does next.” — Locus

About the book

“The original print edition of Spirits Abroad was published by Fixi Novo in 2014. It was also released as an ebook containing extra stories and author’s notes. The Small Beer Press edition is an expanded edition published in August 2021, containing nine added stories including Hugo Award winner ‘If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again’.”

Zen Cho is the author of Black Water Sister, the Sorcerer to the Crown novels and a novella, The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water, as well as the short story collection Spirits Abroad. She is a Hugo, Crawford and British Fantasy Award winner, and a finalist for the Locus and Astounding Awards. She was born and raised in Malaysia, resides in the UK, and lives in a notional space between the two.

Cover by Wesley Allsbrook.

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