Aaron's 2012 Hugo Recommendations :: Campbell Award for Best New Author

While technically not a Hugo Award, I encourage every Hugo voter to nominate for the Campbell Award for best new author. A great many excellent writers have joined the science fiction and fantasy field in the past two years. You can see a list of many of them over at the Writertopia Campbell page.

Here in alphabetical order are the new authors I am planning to nominate. Yes, I am crass enough to nominate myself, not because I think I have any chance of making the ballot, but because even seeing myself on the list of nominated authors would be a thrill. For each author, I'm listing one or two works to start with, if you're interested in giving these authors a try:

Monica Byrne ("Nine Bodies of Water," Fantasy; "Five Letters from New Laverne," Shimmer)
Van Aaron Hughes ("The Dualist," Writers of the Future Vol. 27; "Random Fire," Abyss & Apex)
Stina Leicht (Of Blood and Honey; And Blue Skies from Pain)
Patrick O'Sullivan ("Maddy Dune's First and Only Spelling Bee," Writers of the Future Vol. 27)
Brad R. Torgersen ("Ray of Light," Analog; "Exanastasis," Writers of the Future Vol. 26)

Monica Byrne and Brad Torgersen are in their second year of eligibility, while the others will get another chance next year. From this list, I think Stina Leicht and Brad Torgersen are the most likely to make the ballot. Nominations are due March 11.

Good luck to all the eligible new writers!

Battle of the Books, Winter 2012, Second Semifinal :: And Blue Skies from Pain by Stina Leicht vs. Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear

Our second Battle of the Books semifinal matches And Blue Skies from Pain by Stina Leicht against Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear. Whichever book I most want to continue reading after the first 100 pages will advance to the championship round.

And Blue Skies from Pain: Night Shade trade paperback, March 2012, 359 pages, cover art by Min Yum. And Blue Skies from Pain got here with wins in the first round over Kristine Kathryn Rusch's Boneyards and in the second round over Ari Marmell's Thief's Covenant.

In And Blue Skies from Pain (title from Pink Floyd) and its prequel, Of Blood and Honey, the Catholic Church has been engaged in a centuries-long battle with fallen angels and other supernatural creatures. In Northern Ireland in the 1970's, our characters are working to forge a peace between the Church and the shapeshifting Fianna. In the first 50 pages, our protagonist Liam, the son of a mortal and one of the Fianna, agreed to be tested to help the Catholic warrior-priests determine if he has a soul. But in the next 50 pages, things go awry, as a group of the priest-warriors beat Liam senseless for no apparent reason. Liam's friend, Father Murray, believes the soldiers were under the influence of the Fallen, and he tries to persuade Liam not to abandon the peace process.

Range of Ghosts: Tor hardcover, March 2012, 334 pages. Range of Ghosts reached the semifinals by defeating Jack of Ravens by Mark Chadbourn in the first round and The Pillars of Hercules by David Constantine (aka David J. Williams?) in the second round.

Range of Ghosts is epic fantasy in a setting inspired by the ancient Mongol Empire. The first 50 pages introduced us to our hero Temur, who barely survived the fighting in a war of succession that Temur's late brother lost to their uncle. Temur has gone into exile, befriending some of the other survivors of the fighting, but he is pursued by ghosts summoned by a powerful sorcerer in his uncle's employ. In the next 50 pages, we see much more of another key character, Samarkar, a woman who has willingly undergone surgery leaving her barren, in order to train as a sorcerer, if she proves to have the requisite magical ability. Meanwhile, Temur has survived the fight with the ghosts, but they have abducted his young lover, and he undertakes a quest to rescue her from the mountainous region called the Range of Ghosts. (Thankfully, it doesn't take him many pages to get there -- this is not a travelogue quest fantasy.)

The Battle: Stina Leicht is a new author who finds herself in the Battle of the Books semifinals with three heavyweights of the genre: Elizabeth Bear, Charles de Lint, and Orson Scott Card. But she acquits herself very nicely with And Blue Skies from Pain. I am highly impressed with her confidence in telling this story. This is a book about werewolf-like creatures that she manages to make feel very fresh, a story with a protagonist who is rough around the edges and yet most sympathetic, a story convincingly set in Ireland even though Leicht is an American living in Texas.

On the strength of these 100 pages, I'll be nominating Stina Leicht for the Campbell Award for best new author, and if you have a ballot you should too. (As an aside, there are many interesting new writers in the field today, and I strongly encourage more people to nominate for the Campbell. Start with Stina Leicht, and then name four other new writers who have impressed you. If you can't think of four others, then check out the Writertopia list of Campbell-eligible authors. And if you happen to notice that I'm also on that list, under my pretentious full name Van Aaron Hughes, well, that's cool too.)

The bad news for Leicht is she has run into a juggernaut in Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear. This book combines fantasy storytelling at the level of George R.R. Martin with an Eastern flavor that puts me in mind of Guy Gavriel Kay's Under Heaven. The plotting and characterization is first-rate, and then you add to that the setpieces, which remind you why you first became a fantasy reader, for that sense of the magical. Here, for instance, is a monk with failing eyesight, tending to the numberless dead from the war of succession that triggered our story:

But he was not so blind yet that he could not see the color and motion as another butterfly flitted past--this one brilliant orange--then another, and another, and one more, until they filled the air with a tumult of wings so thick one could hear them whispering and smell their dusty scent. His fingertips crept to his lips and pressed there, as if to hold the exclamation in.

The butterflies swirled around him, shimmering changeable colors like rare jewels: blues and golds and greens and vermilions, pearl-whites, purples verging on blacks, reds like the heartsblood that twined slender vines up the steppe grass to wave above it, throwing its bright heads high into the ceaseless wind. He felt the brush of their wings. He breathed between his fingers so as not to inhale one.

If the monk had been able to see from the perspective of a falcon or one of the black birds to which he commended the dead, he would have known that each butterfly flitted into existence over the lips of a dead man or boy or occasional woman. That each one then beat wings to gain altitude and joined the general migration.

I know this kind of beautiful yet tragic imagery will stay with me long after I put this book down.

THE WINNER: RANGE OF GHOSTS by Elizabeth Bear

Range of Ghosts proceeds to the championship round, to take on Eyes Like Leaves by Charles de Lint.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the Books, Winter 2012 :: Final Four

We are down to the Final Four in the Winter 2012 Fantastic Reviews Battle of the Books:

Eyes Like Leaves by Charles de Lint vs. Shadows in Flight by Orson Scott Card

And Blue Skies from Pain by Stina Leicht vs. Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear

A huge thank you to everyone who has taken an interest in this tournament. Hits at the blog are way up over the past month, and at least half the authors of books in the tournament commented on it at our blog or their own or at Facebook or Twitter. We're very glad folks seem to enjoy this new format. We know we're having a blast, and plan to continue with this format for the foreseeable future. We already have 14 books for the next bracket, so we'll be announcing our Spring Bracket shortly after the current Winter Bracket concludes. Authors and publicists, if you want your book included, you can find the rules and an address to send your book here.

As for the rest of this bracket, we will announce the Charles de Lint / Orson Scott Card winner on Monday, the Elizabeth Bear / Stina Leicht contest on Tuesday, and then crown a champion on Thursday, February 16.

Looking over the bracket, we have discovered a lot more good than bad. While not every book has been to my (Aaron's) tastes, they are all very capably written, including the two self-published books. The books I had to drop out in the second round were so good that we are considering doing full reviews of a couple of them -- or maybe even following up with a consolation bracket.

I am a bit surprised that the four books we named as the "seeded" books at the outset all ended up advancing to the Final Four -- I was expecting more upsets than that. But I suspect that has a lot to do with the composition of this particular bracket. It wasn't that hard to anticipate that Charles de Lint or Elizabeth Bear might come up with a pretty fair book. It looks like our next bracket will have fewer "big names," and thus should be harder to predict.

As with the March Madness tournament, the upside of not having a lot of upsets is that the Final Four features a very high level of competition. Charles de Lint, Orson Scott Card, Elizabeth Bear, and Stina Leicht? Who couldn't find something they enjoyed reading out of that group? Don't forget to check back next week when we announce the results!

Battle of the Books, Winter 2012, Second Round :: Thief's Covenant by Ari Marmell vs. And Blue Skies from Pain by Stina Leicht

We continue the second round with Thief's Covenant by Ari Marmell against And Blue Skies from Pain by Stina Leicht. The book I most want to continue reading after 50 pages will advance to the semifinals.

Thief's Covenant: Pyr hardcover, February 2012, 272 pages, cover art by Jason Chan. A young adult fantasy, Thief's Covenant reached the second round with a hard-fought first-round victory over Mark Hodder's Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon.

The story follows Adrienne Satti, aka master thief Widdershins. The first 25 pages were mostly flashbacks to when Adrienne was orphaned as a young girl, and when she was the only survivor of a gruesome attack on the upper class of her city of Davillon. In the second 25 pages, we see her in the guise of Widdershins, a medieval cat-burglar, as she steals a tidy sum from a wealthy gentleman. She is assisted by Olgun, one of the 147 gods that intervene in this world, who for some reason is quite attached to her.

And Blue Skies from Pain: Night Shade trade paperback, March 2012, 359 pages, cover art by Min Yum. And Blue Skies from Pain got here with a win over Kristine Kathryn Rusch's Boneyards in the first round.

This is the sequel to Of Blood and Honey, in which a supernatural conflict involving the Catholic Church plays out against the background of the turmoil in Northern Ireland in the 1970's. Catholic priest-warriors have been battling dangerous fallen angels for generations. But one of the priests, Father Murray, believes they don't need to be enemies of one type of supernatural creature, the shapeshifting Fianna. At the beginning of the second book, Father Murray has persuaded the Church to agree to a truce. A key condition is that our protagonist Liam, half-mortal son of one of the Fianna, has agreed to be tested to help the Catholic warrior-priests determine if they really can co-exist peacefully with the Fianna. The truce is fragile.

The Battle: I'm enjoying both of these books very much.

In Thief's Covenant, Adrienne is a good, spunky protagonist, and there's a nice mystery to how the different phases of her life fit together. I am intrigued by what the 147 different gods in this world are up to. Marmell is also exploring the implications of social stratification in Davillon, which is an interesting theme for a YA book.

Because of all these strengths, I loved the first 25 pages of Thief's Covenant. However, the second 25 pages, which consisted mostly of Adrienne as Widdershins pulling off a heist, didn't work quite as well for me. The problem is with the god Olgun hanging over her shoulder. Olgun gives Widdershins someone to talk to, like the daemon Pantalaimon in Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass. But I didn't find the humorous banter between Widdershins and Olgun terribly funny, although that may be because it's aimed at younger readers. More importantly, Olgun's constant presence detracts from the dramatic tension, because we know if Widdershins gets in trouble, Olgun can get her out. Marmell hasn't told us what limitations there are to Olgun's powers, but hopefully he will soon, or perhaps he will introduce an antagonist god to make matters more difficult.

The opening scenes of And Blue Skies from Pain deal with the nuts-and-bolts of implementing a cease-fire between the Church and the Fianna, which I presume became possible through the events of the first book in the series. I love that, having arrived at a truce, Leicht doesn't hand-wave away the details of making the truce last. Instead, she dives into the politics of the situation, and manages to make them intriguing and believable.

Many of the preist-warriors are against the truce, either because they sincerely believe the Fianna are evil, or because they can't bear to accept that they have been killing innocents all these years. (It's hinted that there are similar misgivings on the other side of the cease-fire, but we haven't yet seen much of the Fianna other than Liam in the first 50 pages.) The priest "Inquisitor" doing the testing on Liam -- with an armed guard always at hand -- repeatedly refers to Liam as "it," unwilling to regard him as a person with a soul.

Throughout the examination, Liam is nervous, almost panicky, imagining that he has been betrayed and is about to be tortured. We soon realize the problem is not that Liam is prickly, but that he has grown up in a place where suspicion and distrust are learned from an early age. The similarities and differences between this supernatural conflict and the more familiar disputes in Northern Ireland are fascinating:

Father Murray said, "You're safe here."

"Are you mental?" Can't defend myself, Liam thought. Can't shape-shift. Trapped. Was stupid to have come here. A powerful need to run tightened his muscles. The reasonable part of himself knew he was over-reacting. Why was he so terrified of an Inquisitor and not the spotty boy with the Kalishnikov? Then it came to him. Loyalist hatred was mundane. Terrible as it was, he understood it. Loyalists hated anyone who wasn't a Loyalist. Every Irish Catholic knew that. He'd grown up with such things. On the other hand, murderous Inquisitors, demons, and Fey were aspects of a strange world he knew little about -- a world with rules he didn't know, a world he'd been dragged into against his will.

There follows some delicious dialogue where Father Murray intimidates the Inquisitor into being less combative, through a combination of reasoning and rank. The first 50 pages then end with a tense conversation between Father Murray and his superior Bishop Avery, discussing how to make peace palatable to others in the Church. It seems likely that the right solution to this conflict may not be the feasible solution, which I expect will create a moral dilemma for both Father Murray and Liam.

Based on the first 50 pages, I would recommend both of these books. But if I could only continue reading one of them, I know which I would choose.

THE WINNER: AND BLUE SKIES FROM PAIN by Stina Leicht

And Blue Skies from Pain moves into the semifinals, to battle either Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear or The Pillars of Hercules by David Constantine.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the Books, Winter 2012, First Round :: And Blue Skies from Pain by Stina Leicht vs. Boneyards by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Our sixth of eight first round matches in the Winter 2012 Battle of the Books pits And Blue Skies from Pain by Stina Leicht against Boneyards by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Whichever book I most want to continue reading after 25 pages will move on to the second round.

And Blue Skies from Pain: Night Shade trade paperback, March 2012, 359 pages, cover art by Min Yum. This is Stina Leicht's second book, a sequel to last year's Of Blood and Honey, which garnered very strong reviews for a first novel. Even though I didn't read the first book in the series, the reviews I saw and the fascinating premise of the series, that the strife in Northern Ireland in the 1970's was connected in part to a supernatural conflict involving the Catholic church, made this one look so interesting to me that I designated it one of our four seeded novels in the Battle of the Books.

The hero of And Blue Skies from Pain is Liam Kelly, a Catholic and former member of the Provisional IRA, who lost his wife to the fighting in Northern Ireland. He learned in the previous volume that his father was not a Protestant, as vicious rumor had it, but rather a shape-shifting creature, one of the Fianna. As the book begins, Liam is the key to efforts to broker a peace between these creatures and the Militis Dei, a group of Catholic priest-warriors dedicated to destroying fallen angels and their demon progeny.

Boneyards: Pyr trade paperback, January 2012, 299 pages, cover art by Dave Seeley. Kristine Kathryn Rusch is a most prolific author, writing under her own name and various pseudonyms in a host of genres: science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, romance, and no doubt others. She was the Campbell Award winner for best new author in 1990 and has since won the Hugo Award as both a writer and an editor, among many other honors.

Boneyards is the third novel in Rusch's "Diving" universe, after Diving into the Wreck and City of Ruins. This is far-future space opera, with a strong female protagonist, known simply as "Boss." Boneyards begins with Boss accompanying "Coop," the captain of a spacecraft thrown 5,000 years into its future by a faster-than-light mishap (whom I presume Boss encountered in one of the two prior books), as they explore the ruins of an ancient spaceport that was just being built before Coop's ship was lost in time. Coop hopes it will help him to find his people, a group of space nomads referred to as "the Fleet." Meanwhile, we find Boss's friend "Squishy" on a research base just being evacuated. The book cover suggests Squishy will soon become a pawn in the "Enterran Empire's" quest for advanced technology that, as it happens, Coop's people already possess.

The Battle: After just 25 pages, I am not surprised that Stina Leicht's first book met with critical acclaim. And Blue Skies from Pain features sparkling prose that quickly draws the reader into the action. We begin with a prologue that flashes back to a gripping encounter in 1967 between young Joseph Murray and a very dangerous group of "the Fallen." Chapter 1 flashes ahead to 1977, where our protagonist Liam is upset about a disagreement he's had with Father Murray, presumably the same Murray from the prologue. Distracted, he stumbles into a group of armed Loyalist smugglers:

"Sorry to be disturbing you. I lost my way, is all," Liam said, again cursing Father Murray, not that the situation was actually the priest's fault. Liam was the one who'd decided to get some air. Naturally, he'd been in a rage at the time. He'd argued with Father Murray about the current plan to forge a peace between the Catholic Church and the Fey. At the last, Father Murray had been giving him shite about how he, Liam, needed to take control of his life and stop running from one bad situation and into another. Now that Liam had cooled off he was beginning to rethink matters.

I love it when a book begins with a small touch of irony like that, which promises many more twists to come. And this effectively gives us a sense of Liam's character and makes us feel connected to him, even if we haven't read the previous book in this series.

In contrast, the opening pages of Boneyards did not succeed in getting me interested in the main characters; so far, all the characters strike me as rather prickly and obnoxious. And the writing so far has not impressed me as much as I expected, coming from an author as experienced and talented as Kristine Kathryn Rusch. In this early scene, Boss waits anxiously after Coop disappears into the wreckage, looking for a clue to what happened to this base:

I glance at my watch. At least fifteen minutes have passed since I last saw him through the gaps in the rocks.

"You want to send someone in?" Mikk asks, which means he's saying, in Mikk-speak, that he's volunteering to go inside because he believes it crucial.

"Not yet," I say.

The rocks haven't fallen. We would have heard it. But I've talked to Stone enough about the risks to know that Coop could be in danger even if the rocks haven't fallen. He could be stuck in a tight area, one he wedged himself into and now can't get himself out of.

"The amount of time that has passed is relatively insignificant, given what he's trying to do," Stone says.

I kind of like the "Mikk-speak" bit, but repeating the phrase "the rocks haven't fallen" seems clumsy to me, and the "relatively insignificant" dialogue rather clunky. More importantly, this scene is supposed to be building tension as they wait to hear if Coop is all right, but it falls flat because Rusch has not explained why the guy doesn't have a radio or communicator to keep in contact with the group. Hell, he isn't going that far -- couldn't he just yell for help if he were trapped?

For me, the last scene in Chapter 1 of And Blue Skies from Pain, in which Catholic priests and the Fianna meet to establish a truce, when many of them are obviously conflicted, even exchanging thinly-veiled threats, carried a great deal more tension. This is the book I am anxious to keep reading.

THE WINNER: AND BLUE SKIES FROM PAIN by Stina Leicht

And Blue Skies from Pain will meet Ari Marmell's Thief's Covenant in the second round.

To see the whole bracket, click here.