On the Amazon book blog, I just posted an interview Graham Sleight did with Farah Mendlesohn about a book she edited titled On Joanna Russ. It’s a fascinating book and an equally fascinating interview, and I highly recommend you check it out.

Among other things, Farah points out the potential problems of the old boys’ club as typified by guys hanging out with guys at cons. Inasmuch as conventions are business opportunities–work-related–she has a good point, although I wonder if this is more of a UK phenomenon? (Update: I may wonder this, but Farah says it’s something observed at US cons.) At least, I know Ann and I always meet with and hang out with a wide variety of creators and editors whenever we’re at a con–there’s absolutely no backroom, smoke-filled nudge-nudge, wink-wink. She also says that men should be more proactive about complaining about male-only panels at cons. I agree in theory, but in practice the decision-making process behind con panels tends to be muddled and disorganized across many different criteria. My hope would be two-fold: (1) that cons wouldn’t put us white males on panels in this position to begin with and (2) that cons would be more systematic and thoughtful about programming in general. (With the understanding that being in charge of programming, and dealing with writer egos generally is a really thankless job.) In any event, food for thought.

I also talk briefly in the premable to the feature about The Secret Feminist Cabal, which I hope to devote a blog post to late in the week, depending on other deadlines.

Cynthia Hawkins has an interview with Murder by Death, about the Finch soundtrack, up at InDigest, under the title “Spore Score” as well as an interview with me at Strange Horizons. (Phone interview from World Fantasy, with me somewhat breathless and using the word “stuff” too much.)

Futurismic has a nice Booklife review, and I’ve just posted a cleaned up version of a long comment I wrote awhile back about the whole publication payment issue.

Boston’s The Edge has an intriguing list of books from 2009 not to overlook, including Finch. It also includes Best American Fantasy 3, which isn’t out until next month.

Enough about me. What about you? I’m working all day–post me some linkage I oughta be looking at. (More than one link per post, and my blog spam may catch it.)

Much happened outside of the world of genre fiction in the early part of this century that might give further context to it, but for purposes of a focused overview, I have eschewed both general History and the Personal in terms of my intimate relationship to all I set out below.

(more…)

(Scott Eagle, in his studio, which is in a lower level of his house.)

My wife Ann has just posted a gallery of Scott Eagle’s art as part of her regular feature on io9. Ann first published Scott’s art in the 1990s in her magazine The Silver Web; here’s the cover of the last issue of that magazine, by Scott.

It’s through Ann that I first experienced Scott’s amazing art. When it came time to think about cover art for City of Saints and Madmen, I recommended Scott, and he did an amazing original, which now hangs on the wall next to the equally wonderful piece he did for my short story collection Secret Life. Other art by him has graced the cover of my nonfiction collection Why Should I Cut Your Throat?, my novella The Situation, and, most recently, Last Drink Bird Head.

On my book tour, I was lucky enough to be able to stay at Scott’s house in Greensville, North Carolina, before heading on to Chapel Hill. Scott’s house and workspaces were as imaginative as his art. Since Ann’s just posted her feature, I thought a short visual tour of those spaces might be a worthy grace note, and Scott has graciously given his permission for me to do so. All photos were taken with my phone, so please forgive the quality.

(more…)

Doing some organizing and came across Dradin and its Eastern European twin, as well as two 1990s issues of The Silver Web, the mag Ann founded and edited. Oh, the old days.

I had been meaning to talk a little bit about Janet Fox, who died this year and who used to run a market report that also served as a kind of indie press crossroads/clearinghouse back before the Internet took hold. Fox was a great person, a good writer, and did a lot for the community back then. I wrote more than one article for her, and she was always very supportive of new writers. Also passing on this year was Marcelo Martinez, who I knew less well but who was linked to Fox in that they were both prominent in the horror/dark fantasy/fantasy scene at around the same time.

Our friend Dan Read, who doesn’t blog, has written a tribute to the two of them that I’m happy to post here. I think Dan also makes an important point about having lost part of our history in this internet age–and how important it is to reclaim it. This post is well worth your time–please read. I would also add I couldn’t find a photo of Janet on the internet or a large image of a Scavenger’s cover. If you have either, perhaps you’ll post a link. – JeffV

Janet Fox and Marcelo Martinez: A Tribute by Dan Read

The following is intended as a tribute to two people who died in late 2009, Janet Fox and Marcelo “Buddy” Martinez, on October 21, 2009 and November 30, 2009, respectively. Their pairing in a single tribute may seem odd, as I have no idea whether they knew each other personally. For my part, it is a coincidence of the close proximity of their passings, the fact that I encountered their respective work in the same scene at around the same time, and the fact that I first learned of Buddy Martinez’s passing in this blog post by Brian Keene, which relates the news of both Janet and Buddy’s death in the same post—and which inspired my own joint tribute. I hope no one minds.

Thanks to Jeff VanderMeer for providing a home for this small tribute to two people whose time on this earth I can only offer a small slice of what is due, I am sure. Please add comments to correct or expand on my perspective, which is limited by not having known either Buddy or Janet personally, and to add remembrances of your own.

I was sad to hear news late this year about both Buddy and Janet. Both had a formative influence on me in the sense that they were already doing things that I wanted to be doing. They shared, it seems to me, a certain DIY aesthetic, which corresponds to their memberships in the small press world during the post-zine, pre-internet days of the desktop publishing age (let’s call it ‘84 to ‘94). As publishers, curators, and artists, they showed others, including me, what was possible. They created or illuminated avenues that brought writers, artists, publishers, and readers together, in the process demonstrating that top-down “mainstream” culture is not all there is.

(more…)

Slicing Up Your Eyeballs reports that The Church has re-released the Shriek: An Afterword CD based on my novel. The re-release “has been remastered to correct significant audio problems with the initial release, and errors with the tracklisting and packaging also have been corrected.” I should note– the first version sounds just fine to me, and The Church always tinker with their stuff a lot.

For more info on ordering, etc., visit SUYE.

Here’s the track listing on the re-release. I don’t have the original in front of me, but I do think it may be different by one song.

1. “We Dwell In Fragile Temporary”
2. “Shriek Voices”
3. “Shriek Theme”
4. “Duncan And Mary”
5. “Even The Flies Have Eyes”
6. “The Gray Caps”
7. “Truffidian Church”
8. “Ambergris”
9. “My Love, Last Night”
10. “Incident On Bannerville”
11. “A Tragi-comic Family Story”
12. “A Tale For You”
13. “We Are Lost”
14. “Dream Of Edward”
15. “War Of The Houses”
16. “Shriek – Reversal”
17. “The Aan Tribal War”

(My gawd–this is so weird. Before I renounced cephalopods earlier this year, my next novel was going to be titled The Squid and the Squid.)

Since most of my predictions for 2009 came true–I predicted in 2008, for example, that I would end my 2009 Booklife/Finch tour reading from a storage closet in an Atlanta bar and that the blogosphere would come apart at the seams during a harmless discussion of magazine pay rates–I’ve decided to again put forth some knowledgeable mutterings about the year to come.

(1) I predict that China Mieville will publish a novel about squid and that it will be odd. I predict this because you could see this coming as early as 2003, when City of Saints & Madmen came out in the U.S. China’s entry in the bibliography of “King Squid”–Naughty Lisp and the Squid–points to an unhealthy obsession–one I used to share, but which I have since put behind me.

(2) Because Jane Austen has so much to answer for now, scientists will clone her by combining her DNA with the DNA of a woolly mammoth and she will appear before the International Court on charges of Ridiculous Cross-Pollution, the resulting mash-up called Pride of the Courtly Cave Bears.

(Baby mammoth, or a resurrected Jane Austen?)

(2) Margaret Atwood will announce her new invention, on which she has been hard at work for the past few years: The Infernal Claw. This device, which has replaced her right hand and wrist, is indeed a steel claw hooked up to a machine that allows her, even in her sleep, to remotely sign readers’ books. Her books will now come with nanotechnology embedded in the title pages so that she may randomly and without warning sign your copy of her latest novel. The ectoplasmic, alt-world doppelganger of The Infernal Claw will use the nanotechnology on the title page as a portal through which to enter your brain and both tickle it and convince you to admit that you do not write science fiction (and, in many cases, this will be true).

Somehow, it seems entirely appropriate to post about The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals on Christmas Day…and necessary since Foreward posted about the book earlier this week. A lot of reverb from that and great word-of-mouth, so I just want to make sure that readers have all the info about the book now, even though it’s not out until February 2010 (just in time for Purim).

The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals isn’t a rehash of the original post from back in 2007. The selection from the dialogue between me and my wife on the subject is only one element of the book–and each discussion has been carefully and in most cases completely revised. But in addition to those sections, the book contains the following:

- Master designer John Coulthart’s brilliant design and copious selection of illustrations.

- Hugo Award winner Ann VanderMeer’s introduction on Jews and food.

- A foreword by Joseph Nigg, author of the Oxford University Press’s definitive guide to fantastical beasts and, under the name “Topsell” the mastermind behind the wildly popular How to Keep and Train a Dragon.

- An often tongue-in-cheek original description of each beast by yours truly.

- Ann’s conversation with Food Network star (Ace of Cakes) Duff Goldman about how you’d cook, say, a Mongolian Deathworm, and what evil tastes like.

- As an added bonus, one illo is by one of our favorite artists, Ian Miller.

All this in a beautiful little hardcover book, and a website coming soon that will include extras like the recipe cards displayed below (Ann wrote the text for those).

I highly suggest preordering this book because my gut tells me the first edition print run, no matter how large, is going to sell out within weeks of publication.

Samples from the book below the cut, and my apologies for another “book ad”–you’ll have plenty of real content here from me in the next few months.

(more…)

In doing research for a project, I came across my contributor copy of Air Fish: An Anthology of Speculative Works edited by Joy Oestreicher and Richard Singer. It was published about 17 years ago in 1993. For its year, I thought it was one of the stronger anthologies. Here’s the complete table of contents. I reproduce it here because I find an occasional “core sample” from the history of genre instructive at times, especially as we slouch toward 2010.

The particulars about Air Fish: It was a cross-genre, indie-press anthology that probably shared a lot in common with the now defunct(and always interesting) fiction magazine New Pathways, which itself shared points of view with the largely nonfic magazine SF Eye, one of the great lost mags covering genre fiction.

Much as CDs and downloads brought many albums back into wide release, I think anthologies like Air Fish provide a good argument for finding ways to bring back inexpensive PDF or print-on-demand editions of these ghosts lost to hardcopy history. (Assuming copyright issues can be dealt with.)

What do the contents tell us about genre fiction in 1993? What does it tell us about the arc and longevity of careers? What does it tell us about the indie press of the time? (Recognizing…it’s a very small sample, but still…)

(Larger version of the image here.)

(Larger version of the image here.)

For me, this TOC is first and foremost…awesome. It’s jam-packed with talent. It also brings back nostalgia and “where-are-they-now” emotions, along with a recognition of fellow survivors.

Cory Doctorow and I went to Clarion East together in 1992. Brian Evenson and I met when our first books both went south with the same publisher around 1994. Misha, Michael Andre-Driussi, and Thomas Metzger were all writers I always felt I looked at from across a long hallway with an admiring nod. Jacie Ragan is a prolific poet with whom I had a correspondence via letter. I first encountered Ursula Pflug in this anthology, and subsequently published her in Album Zutique and elsewhere as a result. Bruce Holland Rogers would become one of my favorite writers.

Cliff Burns was, for a time, one of my best friends. Steve Rasnic Tem I knew of before Air Fish–had, in fact, published him in Jabberwocky in 1991–and still count as one of the best dark fiction writers out there.

John Shirley already had a heavy-duty career by then, and Adam-Troy Castro would get one. William Browning Spencer was championed by Gordon Van Gelder at St. Martin’s Press. Mark McLaughlin came up through indie press around the same time I did. Sue Storm, who I haven’t seen fiction from in several years, was a rising star at the time. Gerard Houarner I don’t think had books out yet, but has books out now. David Memmott has done great things as both a writer and as a publisher. t. winter-damon and D.F. Lewis have been indie press stalwarts, their surreal and wonderfully eccentric work having been published now for almost three decades.

Look at the artist list, too: early work from Shaun Tan; creators don’t just fall out of the sky fully-formed. The great surreal collage-ist Thomas Wiloch is also there, among others.

Which brings me to some specific questions…

—Would it have been clear to a reader in 1993 that “Jeff VanderMeer” by 2004 would have a publishing deal with Pan MacMillan and Bantam? Or even have books out at all?

—Could you have predicted Tan’s “The Arrival” from his image on the cover?

—Who, in today’s TOCs, are the equivalents of some of these writers career-wise or creatively?

—What are the creators I didn’t mention up to? How many of them are still writing? (Perhaps others can fill in the blanks.)

—What will a core sample from 2009 look like in 2026?