(Note: this is part of a series in which I discuss works of the contributors to The Other Half of the Sky. Links to other entries in the series appear at the end of this discussion.)

Bloodchildren is a collection of eleven stories by the recipients of the Carl Brandon scholarship, established in Octavia Butler’s honor to enable SFF writers of color to attend one of the Clarion workshops. The stories were edited by Nisi Shawl, herself a practitioner of many literary arts; they’re front-ended by a haunting cover by Laurie Toby Edison, by moving testimonials from Nalo Hopkinson and Vonda McIntyre and by Butler’s story “Speech Sounds”.

The collection is titled after Butler’s groundbreaking story “Bloodchild”, one of the most original and disquieting explorations of interspecies contact: spacefaring humans stranded on a planet with its own advanced sentient species have been reduced to breeding vessels along the lines of hosts for parasitic wasps or the Alien über-predator, though they generally survive the ordeal. Men are preferred as incubators so that women can produce more breeders, although bonds of reciprocal need, loyalty and affection have slowly developed between humans and their native masters.
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To the chagrin of my engineer dad and loan agent mom, I’ve never been good at math. For a guy who writes sci fi and tech thrillers, my inability is a crime. I need a calculator to check my sons’ homework; to determine radio delays between Earth and Jupiter; to pursue enemy planes with F/A-18 Super Hornets; and to obsessively tally my income as a 21st Century writer.

Because my strength is words, not numbers, I’ve been careful in setting benchmarks.

No fuzzy-headed artiste am I. I’m a businessman, albeit one whose morning commute consists of stepping across the hallway from his bedroom to his office, typically without shaving, much less changing out of his sweatpants and Niners jersey.

When I self-published The Frozen Sky, I told my wife I wanted to sell 20,000 copies during its first year to consider it a success.

By now, everyone knows the drill.
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Tales are not lies, nor are they truths, but something in between. They can be as true or as false as the listener chooses to make them, or the teller wants him to believe.

- Juliet Marillier, Son of the Shadows

by Faith Mudge

I don’t know if anyone else noticed, but I’m pretty sure 2012 was the Year of the Fairy Tale. There wasn’t an official announcement or anything, but the nod was clearly given in secret circles and the retellings spread outwards like ripples on the waters of speculative fiction. Novels such as Kate Forsyth’s Bitter Greens, Sophie Masson’s Moonlight and Ashes and Marissa Meyer’s Cinder were released, there were big movie adaptations Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman, there was even a TV series. Hell, there were two TV series! I’m a fiend for fairy tales; I was in paradise. And I was seriously impressed by the ingenuity of all these storytellers for finding something new to say about stories that have been retold over so many years.

But there was also a bitter aftertaste that’s been bothering me for some time. It was so subtle, and so pervasive, that it is difficult to pin down when exactly I first noticed it – in the reviews? The promotional interviews? The posts I read afterwards? What I noticed was this: that when people spoke about a fairy tale adaptation, the assumption was that it would be better than the original. Specifically, that the women would be better.
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A.C. Wise is the author of numerous short stories appearing in print and online in publications such as Clarkesworld, Apex, Lightspeed, and the Best Horror of the Year Vol. 4. In addition to her fiction, she co-edits The Journal of Unlikely Entomology, an online magazine devoted to fiction and art about bugs. Follow her on twitter as @ac_wise.

If any of you out there follow my blog, you may remember I did a couple of posts a while back inspired by Kari Sperring’s Women to Read initiative. I decided to take it a step further and recommend a place to start with the women whose work I was urging people to read. Now, the good folks at SF Signal have been kind enough to invite me to do the same thing here. So, picking up where I left off, I’ll give you a small sampling of women I think you should read and where you should start with their work. Allons-y!

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Guy Hasson is an SF author and a filmmaker. His latest books are Secret Thoughts by Apex Books and The Emoticon Generation by Infinity Plus. His 45-minute epic SF film, The Indestructibles, which he wrote and directed, will be released on the web in a few weeks, and his start-up New Worlds Comics will go live in July.

A second glance at Digital Kingmakers’ research into the psyche of SF readers
A guest post by Guy Hasson

To be clear: this post is your fault, the fault of SF Signal readers.

In my last guest post a few weeks ago, I told you about how I was approached by Mary Belle, CEO of Digital Kingmakers, and how she offered to make my guests posts go viral.

It was…an experience, which I had fully relayed in my post. Her theories were infuriating. And yet, having done everything she said, the new post got 17 comments (viral by SF Signal standards), while my original post (no less brilliant) got none. (Don’t remember? Check it out.) That post even made the list for top 30 SF Signal posts in May.

True to my public promise, I returned to the offices of Digital Kingmakers. In the email that preceded the meeting, Ms. Belle promised to further reveal to me the psyche of the SF fans in a way that would increase my book sales by 1000% in a month.

Last time the experience was insulting. This time it proved to be…psychedelic.

I wish I could tell you I was making this up. But I can’t.

Here’s what happened.
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Aliette de Bodard is an engineer, writer and apprentice cook who lives in Paris, France, in a flat with more computers than warm bodies, and a couple of Lovecraftian plants in the process of taking over the living room. Her trilogy of Aztec noir novels, Obsidian and Blood, has been published by Angry Robot; and her short fiction has won a Nebula, a British Science Fiction Association and a Writers of the Future Award. Her latest release is the SF novella On a Red Station, Drifting, a finalist for the Nebula, Hugo and Locus Awards. Visit AlietteDeBodard.com for more information (and recipes!).

by Aliette de Bodard

A copy editor once told me that I ought to stop writing detailed descriptions of food in my Obsidian and Blood Aztec novels; and they did have a point. Along with an over-enthusiastic love of the colon, em-dash and semi-colon, food porn is probably one of the most identifiable characteristics of my fiction.

I was probably doomed from a young age: coming from two families that both highly rated the importance of food and meals, I couldn’t help but grow up a food fanatic. For me, food is an essential element of worldbuilding: what people have on the table is as revelatory of a culture as religious beliefs or language. It is a matter of ingredients and dishes; a matter of meal customs and what they reveal; and of course a matter of food as a national pride and a reminder of home for exiles.
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John Mantooth is an award-winning author whose short stories have been recognized in numerous year’s best anthologies. His short fiction has been published in Fantasy Magazine, Crime Factory, Thuglit, and the Stoker winning anthology, Haunted Legends (Tor, 2010), among others. His first book, Shoebox Train Wreck, was released in March of 2012 from Chizine Publications. His debut novel, The Year of the Storm, is slated for a June 2013 release from Berkley. He lives in Alabama with his wife, Becky, and two children.

I never really fit in. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t picked on in school, but on the other hand, I wasn’t really a part of the popular crowd either. I was just sort of there. I played basketball in high school, but I also played Dungeons and Dragons, read comic books, and won the creative writing award my senior year. The jocks didn’t want me, and I spent too much time in the gym playing hoops to really be accepted by the comic book crowd. And the females couldn’t have cared less about me (thank God for my wonderful wife who also breaks the mold). I was a poor-to-middling student who ended up being a teacher. I was in a rock and roll band despite not having an ounce of musical ability (and we weren’t as bad as you’re probably thinking). I grew up in the south but I never played a down of football, nor have I fired a gun either at a target or at a deer. I loved to read, but never did my summer reading. In short, I was a contradiction, a person more comfortable outside a circle than in. Yet, for some reason I was surprised when I finished my first novel and realized it was going to be very difficult to sell because it didn’t slide neatly into one category.
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A.C. Wise is the author of numerous short stories appearing in print and online in publications such as Clarkesworld, Apex, Lightspeed, and the Best Horror of the Year Vol. 4. In addition to her fiction, she co-edits The Journal of Unlikely Entomology, an online magazine devoted to fiction and art about bugs. Follow her on twitter as @ac_wise.

by A.C. Wise

It should come as no surprise that bugs – whether you stick to the scientific definition of “true bugs” or go with the broader, popular definition of all things creepy and crawly – are the perfect source of inspiration for speculative fiction. Bugs are weird. They have too many eyes and too many legs. Most can walk on walls, some can walk underwater, and others on top of it. Ants can carry 10 to 50 times their body weight. Fruit flies, flour beetles, and waterbears can withstand massive doses of radiation (even more than cockroaches) and keep right on going.

Compared to humans, bugs essentially have super powers. They also have radically different social structures, life cycles, methods of reproduction, and means of communicating. When you look at close-up macro photographs of bugs, they barely look like they belong on the same planet as humans. Why wouldn’t an author drawn on their characteristics when building an alien race, or an entire alien world?
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Silvia Moreno-Garcia is currently crowdfunding her first novel, Young Blood, about Mexican narco vampires. Her short stories have appeared in places such as The Book of Cthulhu and Imaginarium 2012: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing . Her first collection, This Strange Way of Dying, is out this year. In 2011, Silvia won the Carter V. Cooper Memorial Prize (in the Emerging Writer category). She was also a finalist for the Manchester Fiction Prize. She blogs at silviamoreno-garcia.com and Tweets as @silviamg.

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

I always feel uncomfortable when people start bickering about whether literary fiction or speculative fiction is better. It’s like watching your parents fight at the dinner table. There is really no need to build brick walls around each category, though we are often eager to do so.

Recently, I was Guest of Honor at Keycon in Winnipeg. Talking to some aspiring writers, it became clear that the idea of boundaries between lit and spec is pretty strong, and sadly it keeps readers from sampling interesting material and writers from finding good homes for their short stories. Because literary magazines do publish speculative fiction.
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About the Series:
Fun with Friends is an SF Signal interview series in which I feature fellow SFF authors from Australia and New Zealand. The format is one interview per month, with no more than five questions per interview, focusing on “who the author is” and “what she/he does” in writing terms. This month’s guest is Gillian Polack.

Gillian Polack is based in Canberra, Australia. She is mainly a writer, editor and educator. Her most recent print publications are a novel (Ms Cellophane, Momentum, 2012), an anthology (Masques, CSfG Publishing, 2009, co-edited with Scott Hopkins), some short stories and a slew of articles. Her newest anthology is Baggage, published by Eneit Press (2010) and about to be reprinted. One of her short stories won a Victorian Ministry of the Arts award a long time ago, and three have (more recently) been listed as recommended reading in international lists of world’s best fantasy and science fiction short stories such as the Datlow/Link/Grant Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series. She received a Macquarie Bank Fellowship and a Blue Mountains Fellowship to work on novels at Varuna, an Australian writers’ residence in the Blue Mountains. Gillian has a doctorate in Medieval history from the University of Sydney and one in English (pending) from the University of Western Australia. Contact Gillian on Twitter @GillianPolack, on Facebook at Gillian Polack and on Live Journal at gillpolack. Her webpage needs updating (but not as much as her Wikipedia page) and is untrustworthy, but is at GillianPolack.com.
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Kiini Ibura Salaam is a writer, painter, and traveler from New Orleans, Louisiana. Her work is rooted in eroticism, speculative events, women’s perspectives, and artistic freedom. She has been widely published and anthologized in such publications as the Dark Matter, Mojo: Conjure Stories, and Colonize This! anthologies, as well as Essence, Utne Reader, and Ms. magazines. She currently has a story up at Interfictions titled “The Taming“. Her short story collection Ancient, Ancient — winner of the 2013 James Tiptree, Jr. award — contains sensual tales of the fantastic, the dark, and the magical. Her micro-essays on writing can be found at www.kiiniibura.com.

Editor’s Note: Kiini Ibura Salaam received the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for her short story collection Ancient, Ancient at Wiscon 37. This guest blog is an extension of her acceptance speech.

Writers are amazing people. They have written books in prison, while parenting two children alone, and without use of hands and speech due to full-body paralysis. And if you’re anything like me, these awesome examples of human resilience don’t inspire you, they piss you off. They leave you acutely aware of how little you’ve been able to achieve and of how others are doing more with less.
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Jaym Gates is an editor, author and publicist, as well as the Communications Director for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. She has work appearing in the Chicks Dig Gaming anthology (out in November) and the Origins Writers Track anthology. More information can be found at jaymgates.com, or follow her on Twitter as @JaymGates.

East Coast Game Conference is a yearly video game industry convention held in Raleigh, North Carolina, in April. The conference, in its fifth year, schedules seven simultaneous tracks on subjects from Mobile Games to Education and provides video game professionals, academics and upcoming developers with an engaging program and opportunities for networking and collaboration. The conference is presented by the Triangle Game Initiative, a non-profit trade association of video game companies in North Carolina and the International Game Developers Association, a non-profit trade association of video game developers.

At the core of the two-day conference are seven simultaneous tracks of talks and panels covering a wide range of game development topics appealing to programmers, artists, designers, producers, students, academics and business executives.

I first heard about the conference from writer Richard Dansky, who invited me to attend the brand-new Writing track he was organizing. I seldom attend panels, but Rich teased me with some of the things he was going to have scheduled, and I couldn’t resist.
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Ellen Datlow has been editing sf/f/h short fiction for over thirty years. She was fiction editor of OMNI Magazine and SCIFICTION and is currently consulting for Tor.com. In addition she has edited or co-edited more than fifty anthologies, including the annual Best Horror of the Year, Naked City, Supernatural Noir, Hauntings, a reprint anthology of ghostly stories, Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells, an adult fantasy anthology (with Terri Windling) plus several middle grade and young adult anthologies with Terri Windling, the most recent a dystopian and post apocalyptic anthology titled After.

Ellen has won every award for editing given in the sf/f/h genres. She was the recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award for outstanding contribution to the genre and was honored with the Life Achievement Award by the Horror Writers Association.

Alvaro Zinos-Amaro: Hauntings is a tremendous anthology, which now sits proudly on my shelf next to one of its older cousins, The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories. One of the things I particularly enjoyed is the range of narrative approaches: from Joyce Carol Oates’ fragmentary, memory-driven chronicle “Haunted” and the straight-ahead descriptive simplicity of Michael Marshall Smith’s “Everybody Goes” to the story-within-a-story of Neil Gaiman’s “Closing Time” and the deconstructionism of Peter Straub’s “Hunger, An Introduction”. Did this range arise naturally, or was it something you looked for when picking stories, perhaps as a way of showcasing the versatility of this sub-genre?
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M.L. Brennan‘s urban fantasy debut Generation V was published by Roc this year. The adventures of Fortitude Scott will continue in the sequel, Iron Night, which is slated for publication in January 2014. Follow M.L. Brennan on Twitter as @BrennanML.

by M.L. Brennan

On its surface, science-fiction and fantasy are about the strange, the unreal, the future, the past, the never-will-be-never-was, and sometimes the maybe. For the most part, except for a few line-walkers like Margaret Atwood, it’s viewed as genre escapism and shelved far away from the literary stuff. But peel back the surface and what you see is that these books are always about the present, and the questions they raise are very humanistic ones. Who are we as a people and a species? What horrors and wonders are we capable of?

I’ve taught college classes for a few years, and twice I’ve managed to slide William Gibson’s Neuromancer onto my syllabus. Oh, the horror on some of my students’ faces when they see it and hear me say the word “cyberpunk” for the first time.

It’s inevitable. A business major will squeak, “But I don’t get science!”

“It’s not about science,” I assure them. “It’s about morality.” (fact: that statement does not reassure a college first-year)
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Note: this review originally appeared on the blog of Starship Reckless, as part of a series in which Athena Andreadis discusses works of the contributors to The Other Half of the Sky.

by Athena Andreadis

Cat Rambo’s recent collection, Near + Far (Hydra House, $16.95 print, $6.99 digital), is a tête-bêche book containing 2×12 stories of wildly different lengths that previously appeared in such venues as Abyss & Apex, Clarkesworld, Clockwork Phoenix, Crossed Genres, Daily SF and Lightspeed.

Before I discuss the stories themselves, I’ll mention two secondary but important aspects of the book. One is the attention paid to the presentation; as one example, the text ornaments are almost distracting in their beauty. The other is that each story has an afterword in which Rambo gives its backstory and worldpath. Personally, I greatly enjoy such fore/afterwords (I still fondly recall Harlan Ellison’s needle-sharp, needling introductions) and find that they invariably deepen my understanding and appreciation of the tale – provided that the writer knows their craft. Which brings us to the content of the collection.
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Susie Hufford is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College & a freelance writer.

Lauren Beukes’ new novel The Shining Girls is a repulsive, and yet strangely addicting, read. It can’t be denied that Beukes has talent, and her talent shines brightest in moments when she engages the psyche of serial killer, Harper Curtis, as he grotesquely pulls the wings off a bee or contemplates stabbing out a child’s eyes. Shining Girls is pitched by the publisher as a combination of The Time Traveler’s Wife and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, but it’s not clear if those two excellent books ever should have combined forces.
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Adrian Barnes is the author of the novel Nod, published by Bluemoose Books and shortlisted for the 2013 Arthur C. Clarke Award. His next novel, Neverhasbeen, will be published in the spring of 2014.

You can learn everything you need to know about a society from its nightmares. Vampires, serial killers, werewolves, corporate bankers, demons, and zombies–the list of bogeymen is long and terrifying. Today, apocalypse is all the rage as writers of all stripes envision the ultimate end of…well, of everything. From The Walking Dead to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to the upcoming World War Z, to my own recent novel, Nod, in which the end of the world as we know it arrives courtesy of an insomnia epidemic–apocalypses are everywhere you look.

And why not? Doomsday scenarios make for great entertainment. Death on speed dial, toppling skyscrapers, unfettered revenge, doomed love–at the end of the world every dramatic possibility is cranked up to the proverbial Eleven. It’s opera staged in a field of corpses.

A superficial analysis might lead one to diagnose either morbid fascination or self-hatred as the motivator for both the creation and consumption of such entertainments. But I disagree. In fact, I believe the driving force behind our lust for disaster is…hope.
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Guy Hasson is an SF author and a filmmaker. His latest books are Secret Thoughts by Apex Books and The Emoticon Generation by Infinity Plus. His 45-minute epic SF film, The Indestructibles, which he wrote and directed, will be released on the web in a few weeks, and his start-up New Worlds Comics will go live in July.

A few days ago, I got a phone call from an unknown caller.

“Am I speaking to Guy Hasson?” The woman was cordial.

“Yes,” I said, wary.

“I read your guest post in SF Signal,” she said as if we’re old friends. “The one about the zombies.”

“I’m sorry, what?” Strangers don’t usually call me about these things. There’s a reason God created email.

“And I saw no one left any comments,” she continued.

“Yeah?” I said, warier and warier.

“We can help you with that.”
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“Jack Campbell” is the pseudonym for a retired Naval officer (and graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis). He lives with his family in Maryland.

by Jack Campbell

I once listened to another student giving a report on an ancient battle. “He should have used a lot of cavalry to outflank his opponent,” the student said of the losing general. But, the professor pointed out, the losing general didn’t have a lot of cavalry. “He should have,” the student persisted.

I have seen that a lot in discussions about history. “He should have done this.” “She should have done that.” But, they couldn’t, because (for them) those “solutions” were out of reach. That is history in a nutshell. It isn’t what people wished they could accomplish, it was what happened when people did what they could with what they had.

Which really does have something to do with writing.
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Christian Schoon spent several years as an in-house writer with the Walt Disney Company in Burbank, CA, before going out on his own as a freelance writer working for various film, home video and animation studios in Los Angeles. After moving from LA to a farmstead in the American Midwest, he now works on his novels, continues freelance for the entertainment industry and also volunteers with groups dedicated to rehabilitating wildlife and fostering abused/neglected horses. His novel Zenn Scarlett will be published in the US and Canada on May 7,and in the UK on May 2; from Strange Chemistry Books. (North American distribution by Random House.)

The reporter followed me into a room that was tropically hot and humid, maybe 85 degrees F. We were in a converted garage on the rural property of the veterinarian who takes care of the animals on my own acreage. When the reporter was far enough inside to make out what was floating in a large tank in the corner, I got a “Whoa!” and a quick step back from him. This is always satisfying.

Digression: my YA SF novel Zenn Scarlett follows the adventures of a 17-year-old girl in her novice year of training to be an exoveterinarian. She’s specializing in the care and treatment of generally large, usually dangerous, wildly fascinating alien life forms. Extraordinary creatures, exotic medical procedures, xenophobic paranoia, disturbing cross-species ESP and annoying romantic distractions ensue…
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