Air Logic Publication Day

Tue 4 Jun 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Seventeen years ago Laurie J. Marks’s first Elemental Logic novel, Fire Logic, was released in hardcover and I, desperately searching for women writers to write about for my monthly BookPage sf&f review, was delighted to find a fantasy from Tor with some blurbs. I enjoyed it quite a bit:

Fire Logic is definitely not a simplistic fantasy where one side is right and the other must be wrong; like real life, it is all about shades of gray. Zanja comes from a highland people who hold themselves happily apart from other nations. She is their avatar, sent out to communicate, trade and learn from the outside world. But the outside world is in turmoil: former refugees have armed themselves and are taking over. The countryside is soon a war zone, replete with horribly familiar acts of war and reprisals. Marks has a wide-angle view and has written an immensely political and unflinchingly optimistic novel. Differences are celebrated as often as scorned, and love can be found even with an enemy without the costs that might be expected in our world.

Less than two years later and an ARC for the second book in the series, Earth Logic, landed, celebrations — and another review in BookPage. Show me the reader who isn’t affected when a book changes the world:

. . .  Karis’ group finds a hidden library and an old printing press. They use the press to publish a book that reminds the Shaftali that they unlike the occupying Sainnites are a hospitable and generous people. This is one step on Karis’ path to the nonviolent defeat of the Sainnites. As Emil, the former Shaftali general says, ‘War cannot make peace.’ The nonviolent choice is a strong and difficult one, and not everyone in Shaftal supports it especially those who have lost family and friends in the occupation. However, it is what Karis wants, and in earth logic “action and understanding are inseparable,” so, although it seems impossible to overcome the warring factions, she is determined to make it happen.

Earth Logic is a thought-provoking and sometimes heartbreaking political novel which absorbingly examines the dynamics between two groups of people. Good bread, wine and friendships alone may not save the world, but they make the doing of it much more palatable.

A couple of years later Laurie asked us for advice on publishing the third novel and we slowly talked it over here and with her until we came to realize that we could and would happily publish it. So in 2007 Water Logic was sent out into the world — sometimes with tea! Laurie was Guest of Honor at WisCon, the book received another starred Booklist review and for readers of the Elemental Logic series, all was looking well.

Then slowly the series became one of those unfinished series that seemed like they would stay that way. We knew that Laurie was working away on it — tying up all those stories in one book that made sense of it all was a huge job — but there were family and health complications.

Air LogicOver the years we’d check in and we were delighted to get a chance to put the first two books out in new editions, at first in ebook, and this year in trade paperbacks, especially as it gave us a chance to work with Kathleen Jennings again who did an amazing multi-part illustration over a number of years that gave a lively fresh visual identity to the series. (Of course, the 4 books still don’t match as we had previous cover of Water Logic stripped off and the books were rebound with the new covers so they have a smaller trim size than the first, second, and fourth Logics. If the books do well and we get to reprint . . . )

And slowly light broke over the horizon and then suddenly the day was here and it is June 4th, 2019, and here we are with the fourth and final Elemental Logic novel out in the world:

Welcome to Air Logic.