Lethe Press Special: Time Well Bent for $2.99!
If you follow me on Twitter, then you might already know about this deal. But for those of you who don’t, this will be fantastic news! Steve Berman (editor at Lethe Press) and I recently had a discussion about the apparent lack of ebook discounts for users of Barnes and Noble Nooks (on Twitter, of course). Kindle users frequently get free books, huge discounts from publishers, and so on, but such things seem more rare for Nook users. The Nook does give away an ebook every Friday (usually a major title), but I rarely hear anything about other free books, discounts, and so forth, except from indie authors who are already selling their books at $7 or $8 lower than the major publishers. What does this have to do with this post? Well, Mr. Berman gave me the option to select a Lethe Press title to discount for users of Nooks (and other devices which use ePub rather than the Kindle format). It wasn’t an easy decision, because Lethe Press publishes some fantastic SF/F, but I narrowed it down eventually. For an undisclosed time, Time Well Bent, an anthology of queer alternate history stories, will be available for $2.99 when you enter QV52A (the discount code) in your cart. I’ve already purchased my copy; you should too! But even more importantly, please spread the word! It’s pretty damn awesome that Mr. Berman is listening to a lowly little fan like me, and I’d love to see Lethe Press benefit from this wonderful gesture. Here’s some more info about the anthology: We have always been here. For as long as there’s been such a thing as sex, alternate sexual identities have been a fact of life. So why have we been so nearly invisible in recorded history and historical fiction? Now editor Connie Wilkins, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, has assembled fourteen stories that span the centuries—from ancient times to the Renaissance to the modern era—and explore alternate versions of our past. Their queer protagonists, who bend history in ways dramatic enough to change the world and subtle enough to touch hearts and minds, rescue our past from invisibility, and affirm our place and importance throughout all of history, past, present, and future. You should also check out Lethe Press’ other science fiction and fantasy titles, including Steve Berman’s wonderful Vintage, which is along the lines of Christopher Barzak’s One For Sorrow. Now go get Time Well Bent!
Literary Genre Fiction: It’s Ain’t New, So Please Shut Up
One of things that annoyed me about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was the way it was received by critics. Specifically, critics from outside of the genre. A handful of them praised McCarthy for writing original post-apocalyptic fiction while ignoring altogether the rich history of such fiction in the SF community. While I enjoyed The Road, it was not a piece of solid genre fiction. Rather, the novel suggests that McCarthy is very much the outsider, despite his apparent excellence in other forms of genre. To praise The Road for doing something original would be akin to a genre writer being praised for writing the first realist novel…in 2011. This issue is one which continues to plague genre fiction writers, critics, and fans, even as we further solidify our strength as a community and dominate sales. Like the colonizer masking their involvement in human rights violations by appropriating indigenous history, so too do critics (many outside of the genre) appropriate ours. Alexandra Alter’s Wall Street Journal post is a superb example of this activity at work. She makes several absurd blunders, most of which are fabrications from the ancient literary vs. genre war some of us have decided to leave behind (the war is over; all that is left are people who can’t let go or don’t realize that the literary side lost — academics especially). One such mistake reads: Something strange is happening to mainstream fiction. This summer, novels featuring robots, witches, zombies, werewolves and ghosts are blurring the lines between literary fiction and genres like science fiction and fantasy, overturning long-held assumptions in the literary world about what constitutes high and low art. None of this is new. In fact, it has been happening for decades, and it is only by clever manipulations of language that some people are able to ignore the intersection of genre and literary fiction. Authors who didn’t want the label (Margaret Atwood, for example) claimed that they didn’t write SF; academics reclassified many works of fantasy as magical realism (Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Amos Tutuola) or “real literature” (Shakespeare) simply because it was unacceptable to give credit to a field of literature which included both great works of art and “trashy pulp novels.” And, in fact, what is strange about all of this isn’t that “mainstream fiction” is suddenly accepting ancient tropes of SF/F, but rather that people are suddenly noticing that all this is going on…now. A year ago, it was happen. Five years ago, it was happening. Ten years ago, it was happening. The truth is that the intersection has been there since the dawn of literature. But where was Alter a few years ago? Where were the critics and the like who were talking about the long history of the intersection? I might have missed these discussions. But it’s not simply that Alter is channeling old arguments; her argument re-articulates the hypocrisies of the literary community which helped establish the artificial divides between literary and genre. Never mind that what is “mainstream” today is not actually literary fiction (it would be more accurate to say that the new mainstream is genre fiction in some shape or form, whereas what is referred to as “literary fiction” has been floundering desperately in obscurity for quite some time). Much of what we call “literary fiction” is actually not “literary fiction” at all. Few bookstores have “literary fiction” sections; instead, they have “general fiction,” which is just as likely to include the latest “literary” novel as it is to include something that is so blatantly of the genre seed that its placement in “general fiction” only shows how much some people still stick their noses out at us (reminding us of a hilarious argument which goes something like: “this is good literature and can’t possibly be genre fiction”). But it also reminds us of something else: that genre is in an endless game of bleeding and cross-pollination. And so when Alter channels these hypocrisies, she aligns herself perfectly with the imaginary history of the very people who now pretend to be doing “original genre work” by including zombies and robots and other genre tropes into their work: The explosion of fantasy titles from mainstream authors is eroding decades-old divisions in the publishing industry. “Genre” fiction…exists in a sort of parallel publishing universe, with separate imprints, bookstore shelves and dedicated fan websites. Those “decades-old divisions” have never been firm. Rather, the divisions were artificially selected, but never held to the standards established by critics, etc. Genre titles “slipped through.” Except they didn’t. They were brought in. They were loved. They were declared “pure,” despite their strangeness and disconnection with the realists and other literary purists. But they were loved just the same, because they were works which did something no genre writer could do: write real fiction. The hypocrisies piled up, and here we are, over a century since the modern forms began, talking about the same imaginary divides, ignoring the hypocrisies and “pardons” and snubs, and pretending that by some magic stroke of genius, these folks saw the light. Words like Alter’s are why people like Iain M. Banks must write posts like this one (in which he argues that science fiction is not for dabblers). His arguments are amusing; I’d love to post several paragraphs here, but I’ve talked long enough and need to end this post. But I will discuss one quote: Science fiction has its own history, its own legacy of what’s been done, what’s been superseded, what’s so much part of the furniture it’s practically part of the fabric now, what’s become no more than a joke . . . and so on. It’s just plain foolish, as well as comically arrogant, to ignore all this, to fail to do the most basic research. This applies to all genre fiction, and it’s a problem we’re likely going to have to face as authors from outside the genre use our tropes and concepts without so much as bringing themselves up to speed on
WISB Podcast: Chapter Seven (The Council in Darkness)
The new episode is here after a long process of editing (which may have actually killed me a little inside). Things are heating up in the story. The moon has gone dark, James continues to worry about Laura and battle with his guilt over his influence on the events consuming Arlin City, and Pea may harbor secrets that could answer some the mysteries surrounding everything. Here’s the episode: Chapter Seven — Download (mp3) Thanks for listening. (Don’t forget to check out what I’ve done to sweeten the pot for anyone who donates to the project. So far, four people have donated, bringing me over the first milestone. New story coming to you soon! Thanks to everyone who is supporting this project!) (All podcast chapters will be listed on the Podcast page.)