I’ve added this lovely review from Eric Brown of The Guardian (UK) to the Redemption in Indigo page.
I’ve also got some excellent news to share. Ron Eckel of Cooke International has sold German rights to The Best of All Possible Worlds to publishers Heyne Verlag on behalf of The Cooke Agency.
I LOVE the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts. Love it. I hate travelling to and from it, which is why I come to this blog post a little worn at the edges, possibly lacking in eloquence, but doggedly determined to let the world know that ICFA rocks.
I got there on a Tuesday evening in advance of the opening. I had a plan to pace myself: scheduled naps, cod liver oil capsules, B-Vitamin supplements and careful selection and timing of meals. I even slotted in two sessions of Zumba (thanks Karen Hellekson!) to compensate for the ridiculous amount of sitting I would be doing. It worked pretty well, I think, except that no-one is a match for the nonsense that is trying to make a connecting flight in Miami Airport. I arrived with a bruised knee; my departure resulted in sacroiliac pain.
Highlights of the conference included meals and conversations with … oh no, I can’t bring myself to list all the names. I’m going to forget someone, which isn’t fair and certainly will have more to do with the fried state of my brain at present than the importance of those conversations to me personally. But let me try …
Karen Burnham, Liza Groen Trombi and Francesca Myman of Locus Magazine. Karen gets a first-mention not only due to her name (ICFA was well-supplied with Karens, let me tell you), but because in addition to running the Locus Roundtable, she is my science and technology advisor for the sequel to The Best of All Possible Worlds, my sci-fi novel due in March 2013. Since Karen is an engineer at NASA as well as a book reviewer extraordinaire, I’m in good hands. Her husband Curtis Potterveld and their adorable baby Gavin are also excellent company! Also of Locus, and known for the Coode Street Podcast, is Gary K Wolfe. I had the pleasure of recording a podcast with him and co-caster Jonathan Strahan along with Nalo Hopkinson (always an honour!) and Ellen Klages. So much fun!
I met the VanderMeers at last! Jeff, I thought you’d be taller 
We had a great lunch and chat and they put me completely at ease. I still feel very much the newbie, and they have been so supportive and kind. Another kindness I shall never forget is Guest of Honour Kelly Link’s conversation with me at the opening reception. This ICFA was my first time meeting Kelly and her little daughter Ursula (not so little! That child is going to grow tall!). I’d already met Gavin Grant at the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival. Together they are the amazing Small Beer Press, the first publishers of Redemption in Indigo and my portal into this magic world of spec fic community. Without being too luvvie about it, I must say I’m huge fans of Gavin and Kelly and all the work they do. But hey, it’s hard not to gush a little at ICFA; you feel this immense fondness for all those people who understand and love and work hard at the same things you do.
A Tiptree gathering meant that I got to meet Karen Joy Fowler (another of the Karens). It thrills me that as a Small Beer Press author I get to be listed with people like her and Delia Sherman and Ted Chiang and Nancy Kress. Oh, Nancy I am so sorry about the one-legged squat, honest! I know it wasn’t the best etiquette, but they dared me!
I enjoyed a long conversation with Andrea Hairston, this year’s Tiptree winner and last year’s winner of the Distinguished Scholarship Award at ICFA. We discovered much to our amazement that a friend and former student of hers is one of my former students from when I taught secondary school physics in Barbados! The serendipity did not end there. While in conversation with Farah Mendlesohn, we discovered that the friend who I’d promised to visit on my next trip to the UK is chaplain at Anglia Ruskin, where Farah will be taking on head of department duties very soon!
So many good conversations and pleasant encounters: Charles Vess, Rachel Swirsky, my Crawford cousins Daryl Gregory and the newly-minted Genevieve Valentine, Siobhan Carroll, Theodora Goss (shared a reading slot with her; her story, and her delivery of it, was amazing), Andy and Sydney Duncan, Stacie Hanes, Mari Ness, Peter Straub, China Mièville, the brilliant Brit Mandelo, Dennis Danvers, Nancy Hightower … and all those whose names I have forgotten, whose name-tags I failed to read properly, especially those who gave me rich conversations on literature and folklore and pure, beautiful, creative silliness.
I’ve been terrible at updating here over the past week, for which I beg you to accept my sincerest apologies. There are two new things to mention:
1) an amazingly fun podcast I did with Karen Burnham for Locus which, I warn you, is basically two physics geeks chattering on about speculative fiction and occasionally going ‘Ooh!’ and ‘Cool!’; and
2) some online excerpts from my interview ‘Dual Reality’ which is in the August issue of Locus Magazine.
I really enjoyed the podcast and encourage you to go listen to it. The interview excerpts may seem a little disjointed, but that’s because they’re only there to encourage you to buy the magazine for the whole thing
The news for July 2011 at my agency says it all:
US and UK rights to Karen Lord’s The Best of All Possible Worlds have sold to Del Rey and Jo Fletcher Books respectively.
Thanks to my amazing agent, Sally Harding of the Cooke Agency! I’m going to be working with two leading editors in the field, Betsy Mitchell at Del Rey and Jo Fletcher at her new sf imprint under Quercus. It’s a two-book deal, and I am so excited!
Lavie Tidhar invited me to participate in a roundtable discussion with Aliette de Bodard (France), Joyce Chng (Singapore), Csilla Kleinheincz (Hungary), Kate Elliott (US), and Ekaterina Sedia (Russia/US).
The result is here: (Global) Women in Science Fiction Round Table. I think it’s a very important addition to the discussion about women writers in SF, not only because gender issues vary widely across the globe (and therefore SF may not be seen as a boy’s game in some cultures), but also because for some of us being a foreign writer is as much (or more) of an obstacle to being published in SF as being a woman writer. Please go read and comment.
Just a quick note to point your attention to SF Signal where various authors have written on the master worldbuilders and what they learned from them. I’ve added my two cents, and my choices will not be at all strange to anyone who knows me, though I should point out that the constraints of brevity made me simplify my post. I focused on those elements of worldbuilding that I found most striking (which is not the same as endorsing that author’s world as being the best all-round example at worldbuilding in all aspects, nor does it mean that I think it was the only thing the author was good at).
I am a bit of a nit-picker when it comes to structures and processes, and incongruities and inconsistencies will niggle at me when they undermine plot and characterisation. Having said that, making a beautiful world with poor plot and flat characters is a far less tolerable mistake.
In other news, I’ve been a bit scarce due to workload, and will continue to be so, but things are improving on the technology front. I have a new, zippy little macbook air 11, and we are getting along as if made for each other!
Ouch, yes, stupid-o’clock on a Saturday morning when you’d all like to just lie in after a hard work week. But really, Hour of the Wolf is a rewarding listen for the early bird, because Jim Freund is an amazing host and we had a great conversation. Jim agrees!
Karen Lord reads from and discusses her new novel, Redemption in Indigo. A wonderful interview. If you have half the fun listening as we did recording it, it will be well worth everybody’s time and effort.
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And don’t despair, if you can’t rouse yourself for the live streaming, you can catch it later at your leisure when it’s in the archives.
There’s an excerpt from The Best of All Possible Worlds in the most recent edition of Bim: Arts for the 21st Century. It’s the chapter ‘Bacchanal’, shortened and adapted to stand alone … or as alone as can be with those chapters. I would have posted about it earlier, except that when my copy arrived the first thing I did was hand it to my father. He finished reading it and gave it back to me just a few minutes ago.
‘So, no comment on the story?’ I asked him.
‘It was all right,’ he replied. ’It was rather amusing,’ (with emphasis and a smile).
‘Well, good!’ I said. ’It was meant to be amusing.’
My father has an eagle eye for typos and will let you know when you’re making no sense. From him ‘all right’ means exactly that.
My second novel won a Colly! Second prize went to a play by Glenville Lovell, an accomplished novelist and playwright whose works have won first prize, third prize (twice!) and a commendation in previous years. Third prize was awarded to a collection of short stories by Heather Barker, my classmate from last year’s Masterclass in Fiction Writing led by Dr George Lamming (who gave the feature address at the awards ceremony). Dr Lance Bannister’s work was given the Prime Minister’s Award.
