Writers of the Future Update

The third quarter winners for this year's Writers of the Future contest have been announced.


Huge congratulations to Australian Richard Johnson and Seattleites Geir Lanesskog and Keffy R.M. Kehrli!

I'm looking forward to meeting the three of them at the WOTF workshop and award ceremony in the spring. Incidentally, Keffy Kehrli received a coveted Story Recommendation of the Week at this blog about a year ago for his excellent story Advertising at the End of the World, so can I pick up-and-coming authors or what?

Book Review Teaser :: The Devil Inside by Jenna Black

New on Fantastic Reviews is Amy's review of The Devil Inside by Jenna Black.

From Amy's book review of The Devil Inside :
"The Devil Inside by Jenna Black is book one of the Morgan Kingsley urban fantasy series. There are four more books in this series -- The Devil You Know, The Devil's Due, Speak of the Devil, and The Devil's Playground."

"I thought The Devil Inside would be about a female exorcist battling the Devil. But it isn't, even though it features demons. The Devil Inside is mainly about a heroine running from one bad situation to another while having a titillating sex life."

"The book's first-person protagonist, Morgan Kingsley, is a Philadelphia exorcist, although she only performs two exorcisms in this book. Morgan likes to dress daringly and she has a tattoo, which seems to be the norm for an urban fantasy heroine. Months earlier, bad guys drugged Morgan and got a demon inside her. Slowly she realizes that she is possessed, which is her worst nightmare. But her demon can't do anything initially, because Morgan is so strong...."

To read the entire review -> The Devil Inside

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: As Below, So Above by Ferrett Steinmetz

The story recommendation of the week is for As Below, So Above by Ferrett Steinmetz, published November 18, 2010 at Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

If I blurt out the story concept of "As Below, So Above," it will sound silly. And the story would have been silly if not handled so adeptly, right from the opening lines:

Up at the shimmering edge of the sky, where the water met the air, Son spread his tentacles out beneath the terrible shadow of his father. They were waiting for the ships. Son felt the approaching heart-thrum bouncing off the coral-crusted hulls below as the ships crested the painwall.

You don't really know what's going on yet, but you know it's pretty darn strange. Some of the strangeness is misdirection —— water is meeting air in the sky simply because the narrator lives underwater, so to him the surface of the sea is the "edge of the sky" —— but it helps put you in the right frame of mind to take in the real strangeness: our narrator is a giant kraken, who with his father guards the mysterious island home of their scientist creator.

More accurately, the scientist created the father and his late wife, and they in turn created the son. This layer of separation from their creator makes all the difference in enabling the son to begin to evaluate the krakens' place in the world dispassionately, just as the greatest assault yet on their master's hideout begins.

The proof of how well Steinmetz gets you into the skin, er . . . scales, er . . . I just don't fucking know, of his characters is that you really start to care about what happens to the giant-squid father, and about the narrator's potential moral dilemma when he meets the mad-scientist creator. Good stuff!

In the past two years, Ferrett Steinmetz has published about a dozen pieces of short fiction, including two pieces in Asimov's and a story forthcoming in Shimmer. Another name to add to the watch list.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Dragon Dreams on Cardboard Wings and Tiny Scraps of Yellow by Christopher Kastensmidt

My story recommendation of the week goes to Dragon Dreams on Cardboard Wings and Tiny Scraps of Yellow by Christopher Kastensmidt, published November 4, 2010 at Daily Science Fiction.

I typically have little use for flash fiction, because it is so difficult for an author to draw the reader into the characters and events of such a short work of fiction. But every so often, an author does draw me into a short-short story, and I can only marvel at his or her skill in pulling it off.

Remarkably, Christopher Kastensmidt's "Dragon Dreams on Cardboard Wings and Tiny Scraps of Yellow" tells an absorbing story in under 400 words, barely longer than this blog post. All we learn in that length about the main character is that she is a computer programmer working in a cubicle farm. Yet her yearning to escape her mundane existence strikes a universal chord.

In his author notes, Kastensmidt tells us that "Dragon Dreams" was inspired by Leonardo Amora Leite's painting "Meu Dragão I" (My Dragon I), which the artist has graciously permitted us to reproduce here (click for a larger image):

Christopher Kastensmidt is an American living in Brazil, who designs video games when he is not writing fiction and poetry. He has co-written a Little Red Riding Hood parody with Jim C. Hines and appeared in various publications including Realms of Fantasy and Every Day Fiction. Judging from "Dragon Dreams," I suspect we will be hearing much more from him in the near future.

Daily Science Fiction is a new site that publishes a story every weekday, at professional rates, and has already featured work by such excellent authors as Mary Robinette Kowal, David D. Levine, Tim Pratt, Cat Rambo, Lavie Tidhar, and Greg van Eekhout. Most but not all of Daily SF's stories are flash fiction (their pattern seems to be to publish longer pieces on Friday), so I'm not their ideal reader, but they got me with "Dragon Dreams."

I highly recommend "Dragon Dreams," and since it won't take you but two minutes to read, what possible excuse can you have for not checking it out?

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: When I'm Armouring My Belly by Gemma Files

The recommended story of the week is "When I'm Armouring My Belly" by Gemma Files, from the Edge anthology evolve, edited by Nancy Kilpatrick.

The glut of vampire fiction in the past several years has left vampires too commonplace, too familiar. In evolve, Nancy Kilpatrick has recaptured some of the strangeness of vampires by asking her contributors to imagine the next step in vampire evolution. As a result, the stories in evolve are less predictable than most vampire tales——you never know just what sort of creature will emerge. The authors in evolve are all Canadian and few are well-known (notable exceptions include Kelley Armstrong and Tanya Huff), but the stories are nearly all well-written, and I recommend the book to anyone looking for vampire fiction with a twist.

Despite their originality, however, to me most of the stories in evolve fail to recapture the ominous and disturbing nature of vampires. Through familiarity, the idea of someone sucking the very blood from your arteries has lost much of its power. Without that sense of dread, most vampire stories now feel now like fantasy rather than horror. (The same is true of werewolf stories.)

That's why my favorite story in evolve is "When I'm Armouring My Belly" by Gemma Files. This is a horror story, profoundly disturbing right from the opening line ("Much later, he would recall the exact moment when he finally forgot his own name") and the initial scene of sexual abuse ("Her insides milking him hard enough to bruise all the while, wet and tight and numbing-cold as a close-packed box of snow"). This unpleasant eroticism is far more interesting than anything we get from most of the current crop of dashing, romantic vampires.

For reasons that gradually become apparent, the protagonist of "When I'm Armouring My Belly" has a strange affinity with vampires. He is drawn to vampires and tries to aid them, even though he receives little in return but abuse and contempt. The tables eventually turn, but Files leaves it ambiguous whether the story's outcome is anything to celebrate.

Gemma Files has a knack for unsettling fiction. She is the co-author with husband Stephen J. Barringer of the striking story "each thing i show you is a piece of my death," which was on my Hugo recommendations list last year, and she won an International Horror Guild Award for "The Emperor's Old Bones." Her first novel A Book of Tongues, a weird Western, is just out from ChiZine Publications.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Near the Flame by Erin Cashier

My story recommendation of the week goes to "Near the Flame" by Erin Cashier, from the recently released Issue 12 of Shimmer magazine. This is the second SROTW to come from the pages of Shimmer, one of the best (and best looking) semiprozines in the market.

Written in the style of an African folk tale, "Near the Flame" is the story of Nygibe (meaning "Near the Water"), later renamed Nygawa ("Near the Flame"), greatest of the Women of Agawa. The Women of Agawa possess the discrete but surprisingly powerful magical talent of telling a story with smoke. Nygawa is conflicted when the new king commands the Women of Agawa to use their magic to help conquer their land's neighbors.

Wasn't this like the stories that she'd learned, the stories that she'd told? Weren't there always battles, and didn't battles always have a losing side? But those stories had just been stories, smoke high in the sky and whispers on the wind. This was life, red and real. As the fighting went on, as they walked south and south and south, whipping the fire before them like a beast, Nygawa realized that just like stories, battles needed ends.

"Near the Flame" is a memorable tale featuring a powerful narrative voice. Erin Cashier is a subtle author, yet the nuances of her writing never distract from the story (a complaint I occasionally have with Shimmer fiction, some of which employs literary techniques too self-consciously).

I am delighted to say Cashier is a fellow winner of the Writers of the Future contest. Among other places, her stories have appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Abyss & Apex, Writers of the Future, Vol. XXIV, and Footprints, with another forthcoming in InterGalactic Medicine Show. Shimmer is a great place to find up-and-coming writers, and Erin Cashier is definitely one to watch.

Writers of the Future

This blog generally focuses on promoting other authors' fiction, but today I hope you'll forgive me a bit of self-promotion.

My story "The Dualist" is a winner of the Writers of the Future contest!

The star-studded judging panel of Tim Powers, K.D. Wentworth, Jerry Pournelle, and Doug Beason picked my story as third-best of the Second Quarter 2010, out of the untold boxes of submissions they get. As one of the top three, "The Dualist" will be in Writers of the Future, Volume XXVII next year, and I will be invited to a week-long writing workshop with Powers, Wentworth, and others.

Appearing in a Writers of the Future anthology is rather a big deal. Past volumes have included early stories by such outstanding writers as Stephen M. Baxter, M. Shayne Bell, Tobias S. Buckell, Mark Budz, Jeff Carlson, Aliette de Bodard, Nicholas DiChario, J.R. Dunn, Nancy Farmer, Marina Fitch, Eric Flint, Karen Joy Fowler, Carl Frederick, Valerie J. Freireich, James Alan Gardner, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Howard V. Hendrix, Jim C. Hines, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Michael Jasper, Jay Lake, David D. Levine, Ian McHugh, Syne Mitchell, John Moore, Jamil Nasir, Scott Nicholson, Nnedi Okorafor, Michael H. Payne, Tony Pi, Ken Rand, Robert Reed, R. Garcia y Robertson, Bruce Holland Rogers, Patrick Rothfuss, Matthew Rotundo, Diana Rowland, Steven Savile, Ken Scholes, Dean Wesley Smith, Martha Soukup, Jason Stoddard, Eric James Stone, Sarah Totton, Mary Turzillo, K.D. Wentworth, Sean Williams, Dave Wolverton (aka David Farland), Stephen Woodworth, and David Zindell. The list goes on, but I think 50 names is enough to make my point. Of course, the list of former winners who did not go on to a noteworthy writing career is even longer, and I have no particular reason to expect to join the former list rather than the latter, but still . . .

To have something in common with all these amazing writers is a huge thrill. It's also strangely unsettling. I have the impression that many of the writers who enter the Writers of the Future contest are young, energetic people determined to become professional authors. I, on the other hand, am a middle-aged fellow who has never thought seriously of a career in fiction, because I never believed I had the talent. I've never even entered the WOTF contest before, figuring that none of my previous feeble efforts would have a chance.

I have always had an absurd hero-worship of professional authors, and so never dared to think that I could do what they do. But in the past couple years I've had the pleasure of meeting some of the local Colorado writers like Paolo Bacigalupi and Ed Bryant, and as much as I admire their work, they are actually not fifteen feet tall. They are very friendly and interesting people, but do not seem superhuman at all (but then, I haven't checked Paolo's closet for capes). I still don't imagine I have it in me to write quite like Paolo or Ed -- who does? -- but somehow it's feeling less ridiculous to think of at least publishing some stuff in the same field. I am looking forward to this workshop next year more than I can say.

Congratulations to my fellow winners for this quarter, Patty Jansen and Ben Mann (both Australian), and the winners for the first quarter, Brennan Harvey, David D'Amico, and Ryan Harvey (no relation). Good luck to everyone in the third and fourth quarters of the contest. Hope to see you next Spring!

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders by Aliette de Bodard

This week's story recommendation is for "Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders" by Aliette de Bodard, from the September-October 2010 issue of Interzone. Aliette de Bodard is the first three-time SROTW recipient, which will surprise no one who has read her work. Lately I've been trying to teach myself to write decent short fiction, and so I have a mental list of very good authors to read and learn from. Well, de Bodard has moved off that list, onto the list of writers I don't dare try to emulate or I might hurt myself.

"Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders" shows us a fascinating, original setting, where the Aztec Empire has been replaced by a strange, machine-dominated culture that never (quite) existed in our world. (Note that this is not the setting of de Bodard's debut novel Servant of the Underworld, although it could be in the same universe at a later date.) Even better, the story doesn't just use that setting for scenery, but to frame important questions de Bodard would not have been able to convey through a mimetic setting or a conventional medieval fantasy background.

In "Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders," the new god-machine has done away with the sacrifices and brutality of the former empire and its bloodthirsty deities. A mechanical "heirarch" arrives in a small mining town with the last of the old gods in chains, to conduct a symbolic execution of the god, who will only be resurrected for the next stop on their tour. But the ordinary people of this town are beginning to question whether they are any better off under the machine-god, which demands their hard labor in the mines to sustain it. We see the points of view of the old god, the heirarch, and the townspeople, all of whom are conflicted in different ways, but de Bodard offers no simple answers to their conflicts.

"Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders" is set after the time of the Aztecs' human sacrifices, but it prompts us to wonder what sacrifices we are still making, for which we will never be able to atone.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: You Dream by Ekaterina Sedia

"We can get over the wrongs we do, but we cannot forgive ourselves for the wrongs done to us, for our own helplessness."

My story recommendation of the week is for "You Dream" by Ekaterina Sedia, from the Apex Publications anthology Dark Faith, edited by Maurice Broaddus and Jerry Gordon.

Dark Faith is an anthology of horror fiction involving religion, although in "You Dream" both the horror and religious elements are rather understated. It includes contributions from such excellent authors as Catherynne M. Valente, Gary A. Braunbeck, Brian Keene, Mary Robinette Kowal, Jay Lake, Nick Mamatas, Jennifer Pelland, Tom Piccirilli, Lucy A. Snyder, and Lavie Tidhar. (There is also a limited edition companion chapbook, Dark Faith: Last Rites, with stories by Sara Genge and others.)

Written in second-person, for reasons that do not become apparent until late in the story, "You Dream" follows a Russian woman, perhaps middle-aged now, who was abused in her youth and learned to detach her mind from her body:

You sit up in your bed and want a smoke, and whisper to yourself, It was never sex. Never. It was a defensive reflex, the same as a lizard that aborts its tail and escapes while some predator dumbly noses around the mysteriously wriggling appendage. You'd learned to do it with your entire body, and only the spirit escaped, not watching from the distance, running instead for the hills and the razor slash of the distant horizon.

Our protagonist is haunted by the dream of a young boy from her childhood about whom she remembers little except that he was kind to her. Her fixation with and confusion about this boy tells us a great deal about her, and about all of us.

Ekaterine Sedia's first novel According to Crow flew under the radar, but her next two, The Secret History of Moscow and The Alchemy of Stone, have been very well received. Her latest novel, The House of Discarded Dreams, is due out from Prime Books in November. Sedia was raised in Moscow, but you would never know it from her wonderfully elegant writing style, of which "You Dream" is a terrific example.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Nine Bodies of Water by Monica Byrne

My recommended story of the week is Nine Bodies of Water by Monica Byrne, published today (how's that for service!) at Fantasy Magazine.

Managed by Sean Wallace, Cat Rambo, and an outstanding staff, Fantasy Magazine is one of the best sources of fiction on the web, along with plenty of interesting interviews, reviews, and other non-fictional material. Fantasy has a distinctive style of literary fantasy, of which "Nine Bodies of Water" is an excellent example.

In "Nine Bodies of Water," our protagonist Alba is overwhelmed by a miserable series of ill fortune, followed by an amazing stroke of seemingly good luck. A child's nursery rhyme triggers visions of where the combination may lead. All her possible futures seem unhappy, but it is not obvious what lesson Alba should draw from that. This is a neatly constructed, gracefully written piece, with more underneath the surface than is immediately apparent.

Fantasy tells us nothing at all about Monica Byrne [update: Fantasy has since added a bio for Byrne, as well as an interesting interview], but there are no secrets in the Google Age. Byrne is a Clarion graduate, with stories forthcoming in Shimmer and Electric Velocipede. Which means soon she will be a famous, award-winning author, able to abandon that Master's in Analytical Geochemistry from MIT (seriously) and spend her days just making up stories. And it all started with a coveted SROTW.