Category Archives: Anthology

Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015

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rh-ybsff2015Friday’s mail brought my contributor’s copies of Rich Horton’s Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015. I’m in there with “The Manor of Lost Time,” which originally appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. The book also has stories by Robert Reed and Kelly Link and Jo Walton and Elizabeth Bear and Yoon Ha Lee and Ken Liu and Cory Doctorow and…well, you get the idea. Lots of people. It also includes a summary of the year and a recommended reading list, in all 575 pages packed. You could do worse.

I heard back from Paula Guran at Prime Books that the revisions to The War God’s Son are good and therefore complete, and it’s off for a final copyedit and typeset, so we’re on schedule for the October release. I’ve also been admonished to get started on the next one which, assuming I can get myself together, will be out in 2016. The revisions to Power’s Shadow have run into the same delay that’s put pretty much everything on hold, but I’m hoping it won’t be too much longer.

The downed tree has been removed and we’re still getting our house ready to sell. Besides boxing up our lives we’ve been painting for the past week. Also sniffing a lot of paint fumes, though not by choice. It’s all part of the process.

Rich Horton’s Year’s Best SF&F 2015

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MorningRainbowHere’s the final Table of Contents as posted by the publisher. As soon as I have an open link to the final cover, I’ll post that too:

“Sadness” by Timons Esaias (Analog 7-8/14)
“Schools of Clay” by Derek Künsken (Asimov’s 2/14)
“Someday” by James Patrick Kelly (Asimov’s 4-5/14)
“The Instructive Tale of the Archaeologist and his Wife” by Alexander Jablokov (Asimov’s 7/14)
“Heaven Thunders the Truth” by K. J. Parker (Beneath Ceaseless Skies 10/2/14)
“The Manor of Lost Time” by Richard Parks (Beneath Ceaseless Skies 6/26/14)
“Every Hill Ends With Sky” by Robert Reed (Carbide Tipped Pens)
“Wine” by Yoon Ha Lee (Clarkesworld 1/14)
“Pernicious Romance” by Robert Reed (Clarkesworld 11/14)
“The Magician and Laplace’s Demon” by Tom Crosshill (Clarkesworld 12/14)
“The Long Haul” by Ken Liu (Clarkesworld)
“A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i” by Alaya Dawn Johnson (F&SF 7-8/14)
“Aberration” by Genevieve Valentine (Fearsome Magics)
“Ghost Story” by John Grant (Interzone 3-4/14)
“Skull and Hyssop” by Kathleen Jennings (LCRW 12/14)
“The Endless Sink” by Damien Ober (LCRW 9/14)
“Drones Don’t Kill People” by Annalee Newitz (Lightspeed 12/14)
“How to Get Back to the Forest” by Sofia Samatar (Lightspeed 3/14)
“Selfie” by Sandra MacDonald (Lightspeed 5/14)
“Cimmeria: From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology” by Theodora Goss (Lightspeed 7/14)
“I Can See Right Through You” by Kelly Link (McSweeney’s, #48)
“The Wild and Hungry Times” by Patricia Russo (Not One of Us)
“Invisible Planets” by Hannu Rajaniemi (Reach for Infinity)
“Trademark Bugs: A Legal History” by Adam Roberts (Reach for Infinity)
“A Better Way to Die” by Paul Cornell (Rogues)
“Fift and Shria” by Benjamin Rosenbaum (Solaris Rising 3)
“Witch, Beast, Saint: An Erotic Fairy Tale” by C. S. E. Cooney (Strange Horizons 7/21/14)
“Grand Jeté(the Great Leap)” by Rachel Swirsky (Subterranean Summer/14)
“The Scrivener” by Eleanor Arnason (Subterranean Winter/14)
“The Hand is Quicker” by Elizabeth Bear (The Book of Silverberg)
“Break! Break! Break!” by Charlie Jane Anders (The End is Nigh)
“Sleeper” by Jo Walton (Tor.com 8/14)
“Petard: A Tale of Just Deserts” by Cory Doctorow (Twelve Tomorrows)
“Collateral” by Peter Watts (Upgraded)

Reprints, This and That but not the Other

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Now that the contracts are signed and everything’s more or less final, I can mention that I’ve sold a reprint, “Lady of the Ghost Willow” (Beneath Ceaseless Skies) toThe Mammoth Book of Warriors & Wizardry ed by Sean Wallace. It should be out later this year. The lineup is impressive, see below.

 

 

 

 

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Making it Up

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MorningRainbowThe new Story Time page is “The Last Romantic” (MYTHIC #1, 2006) a first-person account of the dragon and the sleeping princess from the dragon’s point of view. Which, now that I think about it, is something I did once before, with “A Thing or Two About Love” (Wizard Fantastic, 1997). This one is just a tad different. You’ll see what I mean if you read both.

I do remember where this story came from. It was back when we were living in north Alabama and some of my co-workers were arrowhead hunters (not, I hasten to add, pot-hunters. No one was robbing graves or digging pristine sites). It’s just that, every spring during plowing, it was pretty common for arrowheads to turn up in the fields, and the farmers usually didn’t mind people looking so long as they asked first. I tagged along on one such trip. Didn’t find a lot, but saw the places where the native tribes had naturally settled, started thinking about what it must have been like, being pushed out from the places your families had lived for generations. What sort of hope one might look for, and so the story.

It’s just the way my mind works. Or at least how it worked back then.

TOC – The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year: Vol 8

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From JonathanStrahan.com.au. As always, it’s an honor to be in such company. As has already been pointed out elsewhere, a fairly large percentage of the stories are drawn from online sources, venues that didn’t really exist just a few short years ago. I don’t know if I’d call it a trend, but I do think it is significant.

•Introduction, Jonathan Strahan
•“Some Desperado”, Joe Abercrombie (Dangerous Women)
•“Zero for Conduct”, Greg Egan (Twelve Tomorrows)
•“Effigy Nights”, Yoon Ha Lee (Clarkesworld)
•“Rosary and Goldenstar”, Geoff Ryman (F&SF)
•“The Sleeper and the Spindle”, Neil Gaiman (Rags and Bones)
•“Cave and Julia”, M. John Harrison (Kindle Singles)
•“The Herons of Mer de l’Ouest”, M Bennardo (Lightspeed)
•“Water”, Ramez Naam (An Aura of Familiarity)
•“The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”, Ted Chiang (Subterranean)
•“The Ink Readers of Doi Saket”, Thomas Olde Heuvelt (Tor.com)
•“Cherry Blossoms on the River of Souls”, Richard Parks (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
•“Rag and Bone”, Priya Sharma (Tor.com)
•“The Book Seller”, Lavie Tidhar (Interzone)
•“The Sun and I”, K J Parker (Subterranean)
•“The Promise of Space”, James Patrick Kelly (Clarkesworld)
•“The Master Conjurer”, Charlie Jane Anders (Lightspeed)
•“The Pilgrim and the Angel”, E. Lily Yu (McSweeney’s 45)
•“Entangled”, Ian R Macleod (Asimov’s)
•“Fade to Gold”, Benjanun Sriduangkaew (End of the Road)
•“Selkies Stories are for Losers”, Sofia Samatar (Strange Horizons)
•“In Metal, In Bone”, An Owomoyela (Eclipse Online)
•“Kormack the Lucky”, Eleanor Arnason (F&SF)
•“Sing”, Karin Tidbeck (Tor.com)
•“Social Services”, Madeline Ashby (An Aura of Familiarity)
•“The Road of Needles”, Caitlín R Kiernan (Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales)
•“Mystic Falls”, Robert Reed (Clarkesworld)
•“The Queen of Night’s Aria”, Ian McDonald (Old Mars)
•“The Irish Astronaut”, Val Nolan (Electric Velocipede)