6 Books with Michael Underwood

Michael R. Underwood is an author, podcaster, and publishing professional. His series include the Ree Reyes Geekomancy books, the Stabby Award-finalist Genrenauts series, collaboratively-written serial Born to the Blade, and the forthcoming Annihilation Aria. He’s been a bookseller, a sales representative, and was the North American Sales & Marketing Manager for Angry Robot Books. He is also a co-host of Speculate! and a guest host on the Hugo Award-finalist The Skiffy and Fanty Show.

Mike lives in Baltimore with his wife, their dog Oreo, and an ever-growing library. He also loves geeking out with games and making pizzas from scratch.

Today we ask him about his Six Books:

1) What book are you currently reading? 

I just started reading Velocity Weapon by Megan E. O’Keefe. I got to work with Megan on her Scorched Continent Series, which impressed me with their characterization, worldbuilding, and strong scene framing. I’m very excited to see how she makes space opera her own the way she did with the fantasy heist.

2) What upcoming book are you really excited about?

Savage Legion by Matt Wallace. Matt’s Sin Du Jour started coming out with Tor.com around the same time as my Genrenauts books, and we struck up several conversations about the respective series and have gotten to hang out at some cons. Those books won my affection with their unforgettable and relatable characters, their conceptual boldness, and because Matt writes a damn good fight scene. Savage Legion looks like it could be a break-out book for him, earning tons of praise already, and I’m excited to be on board when it launches, since we have books coming out around the same time again this year.

3) Is there a book you’re currently itching to read again? 

The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. It hit me like a ton of bricks the first time around, and I keep seeing people talking about how the future it foresaw overlaps powerfully with the post-2017 world of the USA. So I am eager to re-read, except I have largely not had a good experience reading really intense stuff in The Current Era, so I am very ambivalent.

4) How about a book you’ve changed your mind about – either positively or negatively?

I really did not care for Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice until the last section of the book. Reading it in high school, I resented having to read it until I learned the reality of what was behind Mr. Darcy’s motivations and saw him trying to do right by Elizabeth and her family, and when that happened, I did a complete 180 on the book and have loved it ever since. I had a great time revisiting that love last year when Waypoint’s media & culture podcast Be Good And Rewatch It did a deep dive on the 1995 BBC miniseries production of P&P (with comparisons to the novel and to the 2005 film).

5) What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

A series I’ve thought about recently that I think made a bigger impact on me than I’d realized is the Death’s Gate Cycle by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (starts with Dragon Wing). The series presents a universe where the four elements each have their own world in a multiverse. I remember a strong travelogue/magical setting tourism angle in those books, and they made a big impression on me in terms of worldbuilding and the idea of several connected worlds, each with their own unique characteristics and cultures. I’ve riffed on that type of worldbuilding in Genrenauts as well as in different ways in some projects that haven’t yet reached publication.

6) And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome? 

My latest book is Annihilation Aria, a found-family space opera in the style of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, Star Wars, and books like Tim Pratt’s The Wrong Stars. I think it’s awesome because it features a happily-married couple having adventures, a system of space magic based on battle-songs and a giant sword, a migration of giant space turtles and the cities built on their backs, and the race to understand mysterious artifacts before they can be used to crush a nascent rebellion against an oppressive galactic empire. It’s earned a starred review from Booklist (my first!) as well as praise from Publisher’s Weekly, Black Gate Magazine, and more. I’m really proud of it as a representation of where I am with my writing, what I’ve learned, and how I want to meld worldbuilding, characterization, and action to tell better stories.

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Microreview [book]: Shorefall by Robert Jackson Bennett

Further adventures in magical coding!

Shorefall! The second book in Robert Jackson Bennett's Founders trilogy, continuation of Foundryside - one of my favourite reads in 2018 - and one of my most anticipated sequels of the year. NetGalley, the magical land of books that people sometimes let me have to review, tells me that I have had Shorefall on my virtual shelves since April. Goodreads, the not-so-magical land of unintuitive, Amazon-approved book tracking, says I tried to start reading Shorefall at the beginning of June. The top secret high-tech nerds of a feather scheduling system thankfully does not keep track of how many times I have pushed this review back in our calendar, but I'm fairly certain I have done it at least three times, as I consistently failed to actually read the book. But at last, dear friends, at last I have succeeded in reading a book. Yes, I will accept your congratulations.

With that start, you might be concerned that I'm about to tell you that Shorefall is the kind of book that lends itself to being enthused over and then accidentally not picked up for the best part of six months. Luckily, this could not be further from the truth. Shorefall is another gem of a book, returning to the city of Tevanne for the adventures of Sancia Grado, escaped slave turned reluctantly-magical thief turned less-reluctantly-magical co-founder of an open source magic coding movement, and her fellow open source magic coding movement co-founders Orso (old, privileged but getting over it, kind of great), Gregor (recovering from some very bad magic stuff, cinnamon roll, also great) and Berenice (magic coding prodigy, Sancia's girlfriend, really great). Raising the curtains three years after the events of Foundryside, Shorefall sees the Foundrysiders plunged into stopping a dangerous figure from Tevanne's past, and in doing so pits them once again against the campo families who still control the vast majority of Tevanne's scriving (that's the magical coding) and thus its wealth.

Like the divine magic of The Divine Cities trilogy, the system of scriving in Foundryside and Shorefall is absolutely central to the book's worldbuilding, giving it not just a particular fantasy flavour, but its entire sociopolitical system and power structure. Because scriving in Shorefall relies on knowing the right sigils to convince reality to alter for the particular objects they are applied to (so, for example, a magical projectile might be convinced that when it's shot from a gun, the direction it starts travelling in is "down" and it should obey the laws of gravity accordingly), and more advanced structures need the right infrastructure to shift reality in an entire area, its easy for a few powerful families to remain on top by ensuring that their sigils remain a closely-held secret. In Shorefall, the protagonists have begun to challenge that power by offering new innovations and assistance to scrivers who are willing to donate their work to a library that's open to everyone who visits them, and a community of small-scale scrivers has begun to establish itself outside the control of the noble families; the opening chapters of Shorefall seem to suggest that this continued power struggle might be the source of the book's conflict, but it soon takes a backseat to the arrival of Crasedes, a hierophant resurrected from the earliest and most dangerous days of scriving, whose presence threatens the freedom of Tevanne itself. Unfortunately, the only tools the Foundrysiders have which are powerful enough to take on Crasedes are either bricked or very transparently pursuing their own top secret agendas.

Another reviewer of Foundryside noted that it's effectively fantasy with a cyberpunk plot, with its focus on the overwhelming inequalities between the campos and the commons and the particular plight of Sancia, who was experimented on during her time as a slave and left with "scrived sight", the ability to sense and effectively talk to scrivings in the world around her (sadly, Sancia's "hacking" is a little less Pratchett-esque than some of my favourite scenes in the first book, but there's still some delightful moments where she gets to debate with inanimate objects about the nature of reality). Those dynamics are present again in Shorefall, but this time the focus is far more firmly on unknowable ancient powers, with the representatives of the campo families shown as being equally unable to respond to the threat, despite their greater willingness to attempt to exert control or assume that the chaos might suit their agenda. It's great fun - especially since Crasedes' power is shown to become greater the closer to midnight it gets, giving the book a great cyclical tension structure as we watch each day go by.

In shifting the focus so far away from the internal power struggle in Tevanne, though, Shorefall does drift away from what felt interesting about the set-up in Foundryside, and its own opening: the tentative democratisation of knowledge and power, even as most of the structures of the old order persist. Instead of continuing to tackle that head-on, Shorefall instead throws the question over to rival ancients (saying "they are literally literal deus ex machinae!" feels really trite but... they kind of are), who offer proclamations on humanity's inability to change and offer solutions about what they want to do about it, but don't leave the humans themselves a great deal of agency to decide for themselves. This being a second book, there's clearly plenty of scope for these perceptions to be challenged by plucky humanity in a future volume, but the decision to shift the goalposts from "characters overcome obstacles to make things better for their society, right now" to "characters now need to overcome the turning wheel of human history for their success to be valid" is... interesting. As it is, the tension of Shorefall certainly kept me entertained, but it's left me with more to chew on than I anticipated.

This is a relatively small, high-level niggle, though, and in the grand scheme of things Shorefall provides everything I expected from this series, an adventure with some excellent characters (while I haven't gone into it here, all of the Foundrysiders come away with deeply satisfying - if slightly heartbreaking - personal arcs) which doesn't shy away from tougher questions about inequality, exploitation and marginalisation. This is a series that cements its author as one of my favourites when it comes to juicy secondary world fantasy, and its certainly not a book that deserved to get shoved to the back of my pandemic-addled brain for four months after I intended to start it.

The Math

Baseline Score: 9/10

Bonuses: +1 packed with charming bits like the conversations between Sancia and her scrived object buddies

Penalties: -1 I'm not sold on the direction the new threat takes the political dynamics in; -1 also they kind of are literal deus ex machinae and I don't know how I feel about it

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

POSTED BY: Adri, Nerds of a Feather co-editor, is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy.

Reference: Bennett, Robert Jackson. Shorefall [Del Rey/Jo Fletcher Books, 2020]

Interview: Helen Corcoran, author of Queen of Coin and Whispers

What happens to someone when they have a childhood full of dreams of queens, heroines, knights, and adventures, then they grow up to become a bookseller and surround themselves with books?  Since I've just described Helen Corcoran, author of Queen of Coin and Whispers, we get to find out!

Queen of Coin and Whispers came out this past June,  follows an idealistic queen and her spymaster.   Lia has inherited a bankrupt kingdom, and yearns to correct the mistakes of her predecessors. Her spymaster Xania has a violent history and her own goals, the first of which is avoiding the executioner's axe.   Politics, intrigue, banter, flirtations (and flirting through books!), revenge, hidden enemies, and the future of a country in the crosshairs, this sounds like an excellent next read if you're looking for a YA queer fantasy of manners with diverse characters, a slow burn romance, and intense emotions.  

Interested in prequel short stories? Don't worry, the Corcoran and her publisher have you covered! Click here for the free prequel, Three Times a Future Queen Almost Met Her Future Whispers, (And The First Time She Did).

Corcoran lives in Dublin, Ireland, surrounded by books, chocolate, coffee, and friends.  Learn more about her work, her experiences as a professional bookseller, and her search for the perfect latte at her website HelenCorcoran.com, and by following her on twitter, @hcor.  She was kind enough to let me pick her brain about the inspirations for the novel, how she kept track of who was allied with who and who was planning to backstab who, tricks for writing witty banter, and of course how she came up with the "flirting through books" scenes.   

Let's get to the interview!



NOAF: What inspired you to write Queen of Coin and Whispers? How long did it take you go from "I've got this great idea!" to typing "The End" on your manuscript?

Helen Corcoran: I wanted to write about a princess who was ready to inherit the throne, who'd been preparing as best she could, and was aware of the political and economic situations she faced. I'm also fascinated by historical spymasters, and the kind of personalities that suited the role of information gathering.

I got the idea in late 2013 and completed a first draft in January 2015. It took about another four drafts, including completing a revise and resubmit for an agent, before The O'Brien Press offered on Queen of Coin and Whispers in April 2018, and I worked on edits through 2019. So Lia and Xania have been with me for some time!

NOAF:  The characters "flirt through books?" I love books, and I love when characters flirt with each other, so I need some more details on how you did this!

HC: I'd stalled on progressing the romance in a draft, and was trying to figure out how to get one of them to actually admit their feelings! I was part of a bookclub, and I'd mentioned a writer as part of the world-building. Lia and Xania are readers, and it was one of those times when two things clicked together: the writer had written romances, including ones between women, and Lia enjoyed them as comfort reads, showing a relationship she desperately wanted but couldn't have because of being queen. So for her to lend Xania these books, which mean a lot to her, is a safe overture... unless Xania figures out what she's trying to hint at.

NOAF:  Who was your favorite character to write? What made that person so fun to develop and watch grow?

 

HC: I love Lia and Xania, as they're both POV narrators and I've spent years with them, but I love how much Xania changes from her first POV chapter and the epilogue. A lot of her motivations and goal are personal, whereas Lia’s are based more on formality and external factors, and that gives Xania’s plot and emotional arcs a different feel. Xania is (justifiably) wary and distrustful at the start of Queen, and watching her grow both personally and professionally, and seeing how far she comes . . . it makes me very happy, which probably sounds weird as I created her!

NOAF:  The plot has a lot going on - political intrigue, family dynamics, young rulers growing into their roles, characters that have deep backstories, and more. What was your process like to outline everything that happens?

HC: . . . haha.

I didn't really plan out the political intrigue during the first draft, and carried myself through to the end with a dose of naive optimism and the help of a vague outline. Fixing that sort of foundation took . . . a few drafts. At one point I had a flow chart of who was allied with who, who was enemies with who, and who was double-crossing at various points. And then it all had to be carefully woven in to the main and romantic plots! It was hugely satisfying when it all came together, but I leaned valuable lessons about the benefits of a structural outline.

NOAF: Early reviews are already up, and many of the reviewers mention how enjoyable the witty dialog and banter was. Writing good dialog is hard! Have you got any tips for writing witty dialog and making the banter feel fun and funny?

HC: I try to say all my dialogue out loud. And sometimes I'll be thinking about whatever I'm writing and find myself saying lines of dialogue or narration aloud, and I then usually have to scramble for the notes app on my phone, as I'll inevitably never remember them.

NOAF:  Queen of Coin and Whispers is a stand alone. Do you have plans to write more in this world? In general, are you a fan of series, or is your personal preference towards stand alones?

HC: Queen of Coin and Whispers is a self-contained novel, but I hope it won't be a standalone. I hope I'll get to write at least another book, connected to Queen but still standing on its own terms. It's set several years later, with a new narrator (to explain who she is spoils Queen!), but Lia and Xania feature as older characters. It depends if Queen does well, and the publisher would like to buy it.

I'm a fan of both! I especially like separate-but-connected novels that expand upon a fantasy world, like Graceling/Fire/Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore. That way you get stand alones, but you also get to see more of a world you've fallen in love with. That said, there's nothing like loving a novel and realising it's part of a series.

NOAF:  There is a fine line between if a fantasy novel is YA and if it isn't, and I don't quite understand where that line is. What are your thoughts on this? What makes Queen of Coin and Whispers YA as opposed to, well, not YA?

HC: A friend of mine said it best: adult fiction with teenage narrators usually shows them as adults looking back at their teen years; there's a distance in the emotional experiences. Whereas YA fiction usually has teenage characters experiencing everything right in the moment of the novel.

Lia and Xania are teenagers with responsibilities in a fantasy world, but they're still going through things for the first time: attraction and love, and figuring out who they want to be in this world and what they stand for. Who they want to be, beyond the shadow of their families' mistakes and legacies.

NOAF: You are my favorite kind of bookseller (the kind who writes!) and my favorite kind of author (the kind who loves bookstores!). How did your career as a bookseller help guide your path towards becoming a published author? In your mind, what is the connection between loving books, selling books for a living, and creating books?

HC: Bookselling is an emotionally and physically taxing job, and that's before you add in a commute or different types of shifts. I found it better to write in the morning before work, as it was easier to pick it up again during lunch if I already had a word-count, even if the day had turned stressful and pear-shaped.

I think it all boils down to a love of stories and an emotional connection to them. I can't speak for everyone, but I read because I love it; there's always something else I could or should be doing! It's a similar love when selling books (booksellers certainly aren't doing it for the money), though you're usually convincing someone else that they'll love the book you're recommending. It's very easy to walk into a bookshop and get a vibe for whether the booksellers actually read. And I feel that same love has to carry through when writing: again, there's lots of other things I could or should be doing, and writing takes both time and effort.

NOAF: Thank you so much for chatting with me! 

POSTED BY: Andrea Johnson lives in Michigan with her husband and too many books. She can be found on twitter, @redhead5318 , where she posts about books, food, and assorted nerdery.

Microreview [book]: Ashes of the Sun by Django Wexler

The beginning of a stunning secondary world fantasy universe, in a decaying empire set in a post apocalypse world.

In a world built on the ruins of an apocalypse, a Republic tries to protect its citizenry from the plaguespawn, magical deviant creatures, and the dhakim, users of forbidden magic. All of the leftovers from that apocalyptic war are a danger to the people they are sworn to protect. But at what cost? The strictures and restrictions of the Republic also erode freedom, and the possibility of corruption and selfishness undermine what the Republic is all about. So when a supporter of the Republic, Maya, and her brother Gyre - who wants to take it down - collide, the literal fate of a world hangs in the balance of a conflict that divides siblings.

Maya and Gyre’s stories comprise the heart of Ashes of the Sun, the first in a new fantasy series by Django Wexler.

Django Wexler’s previous epic fantasy series, both YA and adult, have shown a capacity for intense and interesting worldbuilding. This is on display in the premise here: a world which has rebuilt itself after a titanic magical apocalypse where both sides, Chosen and Ghouls, have fallen; as well as in the magic systems, and the institutions and locales. The Twilight Order, inheritors and successors to the Chosen, forms one side of the conflict, and its use of magic (deiat) for purposes both good and sinister forms the core of worldbuilding. The Twilight Order, working against magical threats, is in a very real way the Republic embodied, and yet we see how they are institutions built on shifting sand. We see Maya’s story through the institution of the Twilight Order.  And then there is the fully imagined and realized city of Deepfire, home of Gyre, a city perched on a chasm, with tunnels of lost technological magic, and the brooding presence of the Order in a city on the border. Gyre lives a very different life than his sister, a life that gives and informs his perspective and that ultimately puts him at odds with her.

Both of these poles of worldbuilding, and all of the ancillary bits that spiral from them, make for a rich world that I ate up with a spoon. There are motifs and riffs, and I am sure I missed some of them (I strongly suspect some of them are anime-focused, given the high four-color magic and powers) but I did recognize the Star Wars touches for certain. The novel reminded me of works by authors like Joseph Brassey and Mike Underwood. I also appreciated the vaguely Roman Republic touches in the names of some institutions and world bits: Auxiliaries and Legionaires are definitely borrowed from Rome. The ranks of the Twilight order, Agathios, Centarchs and Kyriliarchs, are invented but fit in with the themed naming conventions. The author does a great job with language and invented words to help bring the world alive.

Within that world, of course, we have our protagonists. The novel introduces the siblings and then splits them sharply, putting them on opposite sides of the divide between supporters of the Republic and the Twilight Order, and people like Gyre, who have taken the lesson of Maya being torn away and the wreckage of his family, and seeing the flaws of the Republic. The reunions of the siblings are under duress and stress, and the author provides no easy resolutions upon their meeting again. And too, their sides of the conflict and their years-long inculcated beliefs and personalities do not flip  at their meeting again. And even more carefully, seeing from within and from without, it is clear that neither sibling and neither side has a monopoly on truth and are in the right. Both characters develop nicely with the relationships of the people around them as well as the institutions they support, or fight against.

The novel is queer friendly in giving Maya a same-sex attraction, and a potential relationship. Ashes of the Sun is really good in showing the awkwardness of youth in trying to navigate feelings and emotions in a high pressure situation and at the same time, this is a world where both same-sex and heterosexual relationships are equally accepted.  Gyre has a similar, but heterosexual relationship arc with Kitsarea Doomseeker, who has goals of her own in terms of opposing the Republic, and her own story. Kitsarea, in particular, is the most fully-formed of the excellent set of secondary characters that the author uses to populate and draw a skein of relationships around Maya and Gyre alike.

One nice piece of worldbuilding in character arcs of the novel is the idea of cognomen, epithets. While in the Twilight Order that is a formalized process  complete with historically important ones (and Maya seeking to get one is a strand in the novel), even Gyre, in the end is granted one. It’s a strand of an idea in Epic fantasy going back to Tolkien that has not gotten that much play, and I am pleased to see how it works in the context of the author’s character development and worldbuilding.

The action beats of the novel are top notch, and where it really comes together. As rich as Maya and Gyre’s stories are, and as textured and interesting the world that the author presents us, the novel really hits all on all of the cylinders in its set piece action sequences. These can be short sharp shocks, such as the inciting incident at the beginning of the novel that ultimately sets Maya and Gyre into opposing paths in life, or they can be longer set pieces like Maya taking on plaguespawn, or Gyre dealing with local constabulary in the context of a heist. With Mays’s use of deiat and Gyre’s use of alchemical creations, his skill and luck, there is a pleasing variety to the action sequences. We get to see the strengths, weaknesses and abilities of the characters and see when their efforts flow, and when they are ineffective to a situation. Thus, the action sequences lean into that worldbuilding and character development, letting them do double and triple duty. For readers who read for action sequences, this is a way to sneak in the vegetables of character development and worldbuilding; conversely those who really key in on character can get that in a matrix other than characters talking or acting with lower stakes.

Ashes of the Sun is a fully enriching and immersive start to a new series. Given the author’s strengths in worldbuilding and character developments across series, I think that this is the best start to a series that the author has come up with, yet, and I have hopes and confidence that the series will continue from strength to strength. More, please.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10.

Bonuses: +1 for a strong brother and sister pair of protagonists with well developed character arcs; +1 for intensely layered worldbuilding, from cities, to culture, to magic; +1 for excellently depicted action sequences

Penalties: -1 for a slightly unsatisfactory denouement 

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10 very high quality/standout in its category

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know?@princejvstin.

Reference: Wexler, Django, Ashes of the Sun [Orbit, 2020]

Microreview [Book]: Flyaway by Kathleen Jennings

 Flyaway is a rare confection with an acquired taste.

Flyaway is masterfully written but will be a tough sell to some readers. Reading it is like walking through a foggy road, disoriented, eventually seeing beautiful features in fogless area. It builds an atmosphere amidst its mysticism that only expands and elucidates its beauty. And eventually, after much enjoyment of the atmosphere, things start to click to an extent. The fog is still there, because the novel is rooted in ambiguity and relative obscurity, but the disorientation is gone. You get what it’s going for. However, some readers may tire of the beauty along the way and move to a book where things are always clear. Flyaway is the epitome of a well-written book with limited appeal.

The story follows Bettina Scott - a girl dutifully tied to her mother’s wishes - who has a hazy memory regarding the disappearance of her brothers and father. Prompted by a mysterious letter, she goes on a journey with her friends, Gary and Trish, to figure out what is going on

Jenning’s writing carries a lot of the novella. Descriptions sometimes transcend even the most masterful fiction—each sentence is a treasure trove for those who admire wordsmithery. And that lyricism aids the story as it takes risky perspective changes--because interspersed with the journey are mythical tales set in the same region as the main plot. They’re fairytales that circle the periphery of the narrative as you wait for them to come into view and somehow tie in with the main thread.

And things do tie up and make sense by the last quarter of the book. The early goings don't focus on propelling toward answers and are instead  hyper-focused on establishing a tone--a sort of quiet Gothic horror that imbues the story with a feel quite unlike anything else. And events have a murkiness that behooves the story, because it largely deals with the mystery of whether the mystical events being described are real or myth. But unique tones are even better when they’re married with fully formed characters. And despite some development, the characters never become complex. Instead, they take a backseat to tales that favor inventive happenings and construction over inventive characters.

Not only does the story put a fog over the reader, but also a fog over the characters, in which many of them are willfully ignorant to any indications of fantasy. They trudge through their area without wary glances or suspicions of the fantastic, and Jennings doesn’t reveal the truth of whether or not they have anything suspicious to look out for until the end.

While Flyaway has a great mystery that demands the reader work to figure out the secrets along with the characters, it would be nice to have an easier foothold on the story. It throws a lot at you, especially in the earlier chapters, which is sometimes frustrating. A mystery threaded throughout the story is fine, but to not even be sure what that thread is for the initial chunk of the novel is needlessly abstruse.

Flyaway is an expertly crafted novel with pitch perfect prose, surprising twists, and a world that is satisfyingly fleshed out while leaving it with a sense of unsettling mystery permeating the entire novel. Flyaway also demands your patience a little too much and has characters that sometimes feels as wispy as the fog that covers it. It escalates in quality, arriving at a satisfying conclusion. The question is, how much effort are you willing to put into a novella to get there? Your sentiments to that question will decide if it’s right for you.

The Math

Baseline Score: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 For accomplishing the rare feat of being unlike any fiction out there.
+1 For a satisfying conclusion.

Negatives: -1 For having underdeveloped characters.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

POSTED BY: Sean Dowie - Screenwriter, stand-up comedian, lover of all books that make him nod his head and say, "Neat!

Reference: Jennings, Kathleen. Flyaway [Tor.com, 2020]

6 Books with Writer and Editor Michael J. DeLuca

Michael J. DeLuca’s short fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Apex, Mythic Delirium, and lots of other places. He is the publisher of Reckoning, a journal of creative writing on environmental justice. You can find DeLuca on Twitter @MichaelJDeLuca. and at The Mossy Skull.

Today, he shares six books with us....

1. What book are you currently reading? 

James Baldwin's Another Country. It's been in my to-read pile, this seemed like the time. I'm just getting started, but it's already making me profoundly uncomfortable. Which I think is the point, and it's definitely what I signed up for. He's a complex figure, queer and Black, matter-of-factly and pointedly, when that was even harder than it is now, and then thrust into the position of spokesperson for a movement after the murders of King and Malcolm X, but, in his work and I think in his life too, a terribly, often painfully introspective person. The writing is devastating, it raises all these questions I can't answer, and the world he depicts--Harlem and the Village in the early 60s--is almost unrecognizable. The closest to this feeling I can think of in my limited reading experience might be Samuel Delany's Triton.

2. What upcoming book you are really excited about? 

Christopher Brown's Failed State. I hardly ever read sequels anymore, let alone three books in a row, but I am just so fascinated by the way these books portray people, this country and the world. And this promises to be where everyone who've been struggling for the last two books to push back dystopia with heels in the sand finally get to step away from that labor and make something of their own instead, and I am impatient to know what that looks like and what I can learn from it.

3. Is there a book you're currently itching to re-read? 

Sofia Samatar's A Stranger in Olondria. It's an amazing book, I was floored by it, I was just goggle-eyed in love with it, which is a feeling I miss from the before times and want back. But also: it's about a revolution sneaking up on a person. And questions of how that works, how critical mass for popular uprising is achieved, what it feels like when it sneaks up on you, where all that explosive energy gets focused and applied, have been occupying a large part of my attention lately. For one thing, I've been working on a novel about that tipping point for five years, and for another, we're living through it.

4. How about a book you've changed your mind about over time--either positively or negatively? 

My kid and I have been reading aloud a bunch, rather aspirationally. He's three, and it's fascinating finding out what will hold his attention long enough for us to actually finish the book. One of those books, a surprise for me, was Michael Ende's short novel Momo, which appeared originally in English in 1984 and works as a tempering of the wildly metafictional phantasmagoric sprawl of The Neverending Story. It's also an anticapitalist fable. This was my third time reading it, and I had hitherto considered it a little bit preachy and heavy-handed, like a middle-grade retelling of Pink Floyd's The Wall. There are these interdimensional time-vampire bureaucrats trying to make everybody's life as menacingly, uniformly gray as they are, sort of like Pratchett's Auditors or the autocratic brain from the end of A Wrinkle in Time. Only now, in the context of a goggle-eyed, somewhat precocious little kid and the immanent collapse of Western civilization under the weight of its own arrogance, I am just so deeply in love with the ten-year-old Momo, who defeats the time bandits and saves everybody through the power of sympathetic listening, sheer persistence, and refusal to give up on the people she loves. I've been desperate for more characters like this, who don't need to resort to violence to be a hero.

5. What's one book, which you read as a child or young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing? 

Little, Big. Honestly, I try to keep clear of it these days because its influence on me was so strong. It was the first "modern" treatment of a faery Otherworld coexisting with our own that I got caught up in as a young adult, it pandered spectacularly to my personal sense of place--a magical, ageless, idyllic New England--and it gave me a tantalizing example of what would grow to be my favorite kind of ending, unsatisfying in that it won't let me out of the world of the story. Finishing it, I will always want to start it again. Crowley is one of the few writers by whom I've been completely star-struck.

6. And speaking of that, what's *your* latest book, and why is it awesome? 

Night Roll, a novella, comes out in its own little standalone edition from Stelliform Press in October; preorders are available now. It's a Tam Lin/Nanabozho retelling set in painfully near-future Detroit, featuring an insomniac climate refugee new mom. Abandoned by her partner, struggling to survive and find community, she ends up in a bike race to save her neighbor from an ancient, otherworldly entity, the true genius of Detroit. I think it's awesome because fiction--including fantastic fiction--doesn't often acknowledge the heroism of motherhood. And because even though I turned in final edits on the manuscript the day before we went into COVID lockdown, months before George Floyd's murder and antiracist uprising, to me Night Roll still feels intensely relevant. It's about race: about the sustaining legacy of systemic racism in the absence of a public safety net, and in the gulf between perception and reality. It's about a community forging its own safety net in the absence of help or even acknowledgment from above. It's about how much it means to have somebody in your corner you can hug when things get hard.

Night Roll is only the second title from Stelliform, a brand new small press focusing on stories of climate justice. I've loved working with them and I can't wait to see what they'll do next.

It's also my first book, my first piece of published fiction in physical form with my name, and only my name, on the cover, after fifteen years selling short fiction. That's pretty exciting for me.

Detroit is my own adopted city. I started writing this story when my kid was three months old, when nobody in our house was sleeping through the night. So this is a very personal story for me.

Plus, I think it might be the best thing I've ever written.



Posted by Phoebe Wagner. She currently studies at University of Nevada, Reno. When not writing or reading, she can be found kayaking at the nearest lake. Follow her at phoebe-wagner.com or on Twitter @pheebs_w.

Adri and Joe Talk About the 2020 Hugo Awards

Joe: Where do we even begin after this year’s Hugo Awards? The winners were across the board wonderful, the finalists were one of the best ballots we’ve had, and the ceremony...well, the ceremony sure happened. 

Adri: I’m not convinced it’s not still happening. Have we escaped? Is it finally done?

Joe: You know, when I joked about Hugo Season being eternal, I didn’t mean the ceremony itself!

Adri: A lot of important stuff has already been said about the scheduling, content, the tone and particularly the highly disrespectful mistakes made towards some of the most fantastic individuals and organisations in this field. I suspect a lot is going to continue to be said about that ceremony, for a long time. But for now, let’s focus on the people who are relevant to our actual interests?

Also, I’m officially a Hugo loser!

Joe: Congratulations! Am I imagining things, or did we lose by 4 VOTES?

Adri: That is a thing that happened as well! Losing to The Book Smugglers, with their extraordinary work, is not at all a bad place to be! Massive congratulations to Ana (first Brazilian Hugo Winner!) and Thea on their win - and I’m really honoured that so many people were thinking of us when they were filling out their ballots. (And - I see you, 22 people in fan writer nominations. THANK YOU.)

There were some great results elsewhere in the fan categories too - in particular, while we are sorry not to have a Hugo-winning Paul Weimer on our team (how did ANYONE make choices in fan writer category?), Bogi Takács is an amazing voice in genre and I definitely recommend anyone not familiar with eir review work checks it out. Also, Paul got the joint most nominations alongside (also very cool) Alasdair Stuart, so GO PAUL.

Joe: GO PAUL!

This really was a wonderful year for Hugo Award finalists. This was such a strong ballot and so many categories were absolutely stacked with excellence. For example, there was no bad choice for Novel. They were all spectacular works of fiction and shining examples of what the genre looks like today and where it is going, and they were all different from each other.

I didn’t post my ballot this year. I’m not sure if I will again or not, but A Memory Called Empire wasn’t my first pick - but in almost any other year it would have been. Heck, any one of the novels could have and would have been my pick for Best Novel in just about any year. I am awed by how good these books were.

Adri: As much as I loved and would have been happy to see basically anything on this year’s novel ballot win, I have had a special place in my heart for A Memory Called Empire and I was delighted to see it take the win. I was equally happy to see This is How You Lose the Time War win novella, and Emergency Skin take novelette, and while I didn’t have S.L. Huang's “As The Last I May Know” at the top of my short story ballot (that honour went to Shiv Ramdas’ “And Now His Lordship is Laughing”), I loved it too.

In fact, compared to last year - when almost 50% of my favourites ended up in 5th or 6th position overall - this year only two things that I ranked first ended up coming in near the bottom in the overall rankings. I am taking this as a sign that Hugo Voters’ tastes are overall moving in the right direction, although we need to sit down and have a conversation about The Folk of the Air, Booktube, and also the lack of love for The Deep, which in any non-Time War year would have been my runaway choice for best novella.

Joe: I am also shocked by the lack of votes for The Deep. First, because I didn’t really connect with Time War the way so many people did - though I recognize the massive popularity of Time War and I probably would have been surprised had it not won. Even so, The Deep was a spectacular achievement and I had thought its origins in the 2018 Hugo finalist song from Clipping might help give it a boost - but then again voting was not kind to Clipping either of their time on the ballot. There’s a much longer conversation to be had there, but I’m not sure we’re quite ready to have it.

Adri: Elsewhere in fiction, Best Series is always an interesting category to watch, and this year we had the rather odd scenario of The Expanse coming up eligible and on the ballot with eight of its projected nine volumes complete. I think it’s a great winner, and I voted it second (because Emma Newman’s Planetfall will always have my heart), but it does put the pressure on to stick the landing. Funnily enough, Wayfarers is in a similar situation now that a final book is due next year, although arguably the series was never “incomplete” in the way the overarching story of the Expanse currently is.

Joe: I hesitate to ever be the person who says that people shouldn’t vote for a series at a time when it is eligible because you’ve got to take the opportunity when it’s there. The Expanse is a fantastic series, getting better as it goes on, and as I mentioned in previous conversations - I think the right place to recognize it was when the final book was published because it will be a closed series at that point.

On the other hand, there’s only a limited time to recognize a Series - even ongoing series like Seanan McGuire’s Incryptid or October Daye. We don’t know how many more novels there will be in either and tastes and the nominating population changes. What if this *was* the last real chance for those series? How many shots will a series get? Hugo windows don’t stay open forever.

I think about that with our own mortality as a fanzine - we’ve been on the ballot four years in a row now and that’s been absolutely wonderful and a dream that I didn’t dare dream. It won’t last forever.

Adri: That’s a tough question to think about when we’re directly affected by it and, like anyone else in this situation, we would quite like to pick up those extra four votes one day. Taking my own ego out of it, though, I very much hope we are replaced in the not-TOO-distant future: one of the big lessons from this year is about recognising when to step aside and celebrate the rise of newer, greater things. I hope when I’m a fandom gran I’m out there cheering on the world of future fanzines, in whatever cool cyberpunk form they come in in 40 years time, even if I have to get the youth to show me how to access them.

Joe: It’s difficult to decide to recuse when you haven’t won, but I do appreciate the slight tradition in the fan categories to recuse at least for one year after winning. It’s a new tradition, because the history of the Hugo Awards is also littered with “let me win as many as possible” - consider the 19 Hugos David Langford won for Fan Writer in a row (and a few more on top of that, including Fanzine) - though at least with Fan Writer there has not been a repeat winner since Langford’s last win.

Adri: On a related note, one of the least surprising results of the ceremony was Uncanny Magazine picking up their fifth win. On the one hand, I’m delighted that it means a first Hugo for Chimedum Ohaegbu, and recognition for the editors of Disabled People Destroy Fantasy, Nicolette Barischoff, Lisa M. Bradley, & Katharine Duckett (although this recognition was bizarrely left out of the award acceptance speech). On the other, I don’t think Uncanny’s dominance in this category does justice to the extraordinary work of other publications, especially FIYAH and (I’m biased but) Strange Horizons.

Joe: Yeah, I have conflicting feelings about Uncanny’s dominance of Semiprozine. I don’t think it can be disputed that they are one of the preeminent publishers of short fiction today. I pay attention to Uncanny because I know their stories are going to be among the best. They’ve built a well earned reputation.

And yet - what does their dominance say about the health of the category when “best” is subjective anyway? It isn’t as bad as, say, Tor winning every Best Publisher Category for the Locus Award since 1988 or even Locus’s Hugo history in Semiprozine (they won the first nine in the category’s existence, missed three years, and then another twelve in the next thirteen years), but it speaks more to the familiarity of voters than it does the inherent excellence of Uncanny.

We know how hard it is to win a Hugo and that nobody is “owed” a Hugo - but there are so many semiprozines doing excellent work that are not receiving the same sort of recognition that Uncanny is. The Wikipedia entry for the category notes that only 8 different magazines have won in the 37 year history of the category (and only 38 magazines have even been nominated).

Adri: I also question the fact that FIYAH has now come second twice, but that for the second year running no FIYAH stories even made the longlist in the shorter fiction categories. My own novelette nominations were 40% from FIYAH and I really question the extent to which their stories are getting overlooked when it comes to individual nominations. Maybe there’s nothing weird going on here, but given that every year multiple people start a “why no print zine stories?” conversation in the short fiction categories, I feel justified in starting a “why no FIYAH stories?” conversation for every year in which this happens.

Joe: It continues the larger conversation about who is nominating in each category - technically it’s much of the same population, but I think there’s enough of a segment that values FIYAH (and Fireside) as ‘zines but less of one that has a consensus on individual stories. I’m uncertain about this year’s longlist, but I don’t *think* any of them are from Fireside. Last year’s Short Story, notably, had two selections from Fireside - though one of them was one of the most buzzed about stories of the year (“STET”). The short fiction field is so diffuse it’s difficult to make the ballot.

I’m digressing. I do that a lot.

I sort of want to digress into a separate conversation about race and Hugo voting, but since that would require all sorts of research I don’t have the headspace to do and it would functionally turn this conversation into a lecture, so maybe another time. As was said at a convention I went to once, that’s another panel.

Adri: Agreed - it is a topic I have a lot of thoughts about, but which deserves much more careful analysis in place of my random white girl opinions.

Joe: This is probably as good a place as any to start wrapping, so let me close with this. There is a clear delineation between the Hugo Ceremony and the Hugo Awards themselves this year. The Ceremony was a hot mess that did nothing to honor neither the winners nor the other finalists.

The awards themselves, though? This was a beautiful lineup of finalists from top to bottom and the winners are, across the board, absolutely spectacular and as true a representation of where our genre is and where it is going as it possibly can be - and for that, this year’s Hugo Awards were a wonderful and beautiful thing. I am beyond thrilled for the winners and I am honored to be in their company.

Adri: Likewise - I’ve said this on Twitter too, but as awful as that ceremony was, it also made me realise exactly what and who I value in this wild, varied, ridiculous space that is SFF fandom. It’s such an honour to be part of this awesome community in the company of the works that made the Hugo ballot the undistilled coolness it was this year. Long may it continue!

POSTED BY: Adri, Nerds of a Feather co-editor, is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy.

POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 4x Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan. He / Him.