Phil Athans tells us that Amazon has posted the cover art and synopsis of the upcoming writers’ guide Writing Fantasy & Science Fiction: How to Create Out-of-This-World Novels and Short Stories by Orson Scott Card, Philip Athans and Jay Lake. Says Phil: “This is a revised and updated edition of Orson Scott Card’s classic how-to book on the art and craft of SF and fantasy, with a new section on the state of the genres by Philip Athans, and a new section on steampunk by author Jay Lake.”

Full disclosure: I was recently interviewed by Phil for the updated State of the Genre chapter.

Here’s the book description:
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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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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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“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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Garrett Calcaterra is author of the epic fantasy novel, Dreamwielder, released earlier this month by Diversion Books, and touted by steampunk legend James P. Blaylock as “fast-paced, colorful, and richly detailed.” His previous titles include The Roads to Baldairn Motte and Umbral Visions. In addition to writing, Calcaterra teaches literature and composition at various academic institutions. When not writing or teaching, he enjoys hiking with his two dogs and quaffing good beer.

by Garrett Calcaterra

With Disney’s recent purchase of the Star Wars franchise and a new movie looming, everyone seems to be talking about Star Wars. I’ve been no exception. In a guest post at the very cool Inkpunks blog I confessed how the ending of Return of the Jedi inspired me as a young lad to go off and write sprawling stories with multiple viewpoints and climatic endings. More recently, I was a guest on the Defective Geeks podcast where I talked with the delightfully nerdy Gizzy B and Space Pirate Queen about why the original Star Wars trilogy is so much better than the prequels. The consensus among the three of us was that Episodes 1-3 are little more than Star Wars porn-sure we get our fix of exotic planets, light saber duels, and space battles, but the plot premise and characters are about as plausible as a buxom babe inviting a plumber inside to “check her plumbing.”

To me, the most disconcerting aspect of Episodes 1-3 is the fact that in the back of our minds we all know Anakin Skywalker is going to turn into Darth Vader. We all know the Republic will fall and Palpatine will create the Empire. This makes every one of the protagonists-even the most powerful ones like Obi-Wan and Yoda-utterly impotent. They can do nothing to change the fate of their civilization, and therein lies the weakness of the prequels. George Lucas had it right the first time when he started the story with Luke, Leia, and Han: the heroes who actually save the galaxy. But Lucas is hardly the first person to make this mistake. In fact, the grand-daddy of epic fantasy, J.R.R. Tolkien himself, made a similar miscalculation a good 80 years before Lucas.
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That is…fantasy authors Patrick Rothfuss, Peter Brett, Jacqueline Carey and Robert Redick talks about writing sex scenes in fantasy stories in this Geek and Sundry video.

What did you think I meant?

Video after the jump…

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Best Fan Writer Hugo-winner Jim C. Hines nominated me to moderate the first panel I was ever on. He loves breaking in new writers. His Jig The Dragonslayer trilogy, now out in a Daw omnibus, is a humorous sword and sorcery tale about a goblin. He followed that with the four book Princess cycle which are fairy tales gone awry crossing Disney princesses with Charlie’s Angels. Published by Daw Books, his latest book Libriomancer starts a new trilogy, Magic Ex-Libris, about a librarian hunting a killer. Because he likes to stretch himself, being as he lives in Lansing, he set this series in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It’s an urban fantasy with a lot of humor, involving dryads, wizards, vampires, automatons and more. Jim’s short fiction has appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Fantasy, Andromeda Spaceways, Writers of the Future and several anthologies. He can be found online at Facebook, Twitter via his website at and his blog.

Bryan Thomas Schmidt talks to Jim C. Hines about his career and his exciting future projects.

SFFWRTCHT: Starting at the beginning, Where’d your interest in SFF come from?

Jim C. Hines: Ahem. Is this thing on? My interest in SF/F comes from the fact that swords and magic and spaceships and lightsabers are awesome.

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New York Times Bestselling Author A.J. Hartley has written mystery-thrillers, middle grade and adult fantasy, historical fiction and Shakespeare novelizations. Born in Northern England, he is currently Distinguished Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, where he specializes in the performance history, theory and criticism of Renaissance English drama and works as a director and dramaturg. His middle grade fantasy novel, Darwen Arkwright and Peregrine Pact was just awarded SIBA’s Young Adult Book of The Year this month. His novels include two Darwen books, The Mask Of Atreus, On The Fifth Day, What Time Devours and Tears Of The Jaguar, the Hawthorne Saga fantasy novels, including Act Of Will, MacBeth: A Novel with David Hewson, and several academic and nonfiction books. An active member and contributor to the popular www.magicalwords.net blog along with authors like David B. Coe and Faith Hunter, he can be found online at Facebook, at his website at http://ajhartley.net/ or at www.magicalwords.net.

Bryan Thomas Schmidt talks to A.J. Hartley about his career and his exciting future projects.

SFFWRTCHT: When did you become interested in storytelling and writing and how did you get started? Studying in school? Experimenting? Workshops? Trial and error?

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Dr. Ben Bova has written more than 120 futuristic novels and nonfiction books, and has been involved in science and high technology since the very beginnings of the space age. President Emeritus of the National Space Society and a past president of Science Fiction Writers of America, Dr. Bova received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation in 2005, “for fueling mankind’s imagination regarding the wonders of outer space.” His 2006 novel Titan received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year. In 2008 he won the Robert A. Heinlein Award “for his outstanding body of work in the field of literature.”

A frequent commentator on radio and television and a widely-popular lecturer, he was an award-winning editor and an executive in the aerospace industry. He received the Science Fiction Achievement Award (the “Hugo”) for Best Professional Editor six times. In 2001 Dr. Bova was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He received the 1996 Isaac Asimov Memorial Award; was the 1974 recipient of the E.E. Smith Memorial Award for Imaginative Fiction; the 1983 Balrog Award winner for Professional Achievement; the 1985 Inkpot Award recipient for his outstanding achievements in science fiction. In 2000, he was Guest of Honor at the 58th World Science Fiction Convention, Chicon 2000. Dr. Bova is a multi-Hugo winner as Editor of both Analog and Omni, as well as for his many novels, which include Saturn, Mars,  The Sam Gunn stories/novels, The Kinsman Saga, The Asteroid series, and The Orion series, amongst others.  His latest novel, Orion and King Arthur, just released from Tor Books. He can be found online via Facebook or his website at http://www.benbova.net.

Bryan Thomas Schmidt talks to Ben about his career, his approach to craft and his exciting future projects for us.

SFFWRTCHT: Where’d your interest in Science Fiction and Fantasy come from?

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Robert Jackson Bennett‘s 2010 debut Mr. Shivers won the Shirley Jackson award as well as the Sydney J. Bounds Newcomer Award. His second novel, The Company Man, is  the winner of the Edgar Award and the recipient of a Special Citation of Excellence from the Philip K. Dick Award. His third novel, The Troupe, is available now. He lives in Austin with his wife and son. He can be found on Twitter at @robertjbennett.

Science fiction and fantasy is one of the hardest genres to write well in. Seriously.

You probably wouldn’t think it from reading what people write about the genre itself: according to some, our prose is stilted, our characters weak, our sequels interminable, and our plots flimsy. I disagree with a lot of these – like anything, anywhere, of any kind, this all depends on where you look – but none of these acknowledge the real pitfall inherent in any science fiction or fantasy novel: cool ideas.
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Dear SF Signal Readers,

Hi! My name’s Zack Jernigan. I conducted this roundtable interview over the last year. Just so you know, I wrote a long, painfully self-conscious introduction about my upbringing as a white, heterosexual male born into a middle-middle-class family and how that contributed to my desire to start a discussion on the subject of Writing About Race in Sff Literature, but I scrapped it. When you’ve received such amazing responses from your interviewees, it’s best to get to them with the minimum of words.

So: Suffice it to say, this is an important topic for discussion. I hope that you enjoy reading part 2, below (Part 1 is here), and that you’ll feel free to comment. I also encourage you to visit the authors’ websites and buy their amazing work.

And enjoy!

A Roundtable Interview with David Anthony Durham, Aliette de Bodard, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and Ken Liu
(Continued from Part 1)

Permanent shift. In some ways it feels like a rapid shift, but there’s no going back. A few years ago, when I first began going to cons, there were a handful of writers of color that been around for a while-Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Steven Barnes, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, and a few others. It was a short list, and it didn’t take long to rattle through it.
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Dear SF Signal Readers,

Hi! My name’s Zack Jernigan. I conducted this roundtable interview over the last year. Just so you know, I wrote a long, painfully self-conscious introduction about my upbringing as a white, heterosexual male born into a middle-middle-class family and how that contributed to my desire to start a discussion on the subject of Writing About Race in Sff Literature, but I scrapped it. When you’ve received such amazing responses from your interviewees, it’s best to get to them with the minimum of words.

So: Suffice it to say, this is an important topic for discussion. I hope that you enjoy reading this first part, that you’ll return for the second, and that you’ll feel free to comment. I also encourage you to visit the authors’ websites and buy their amazing work.

And enjoy!

A Roundtable Interview with David Anthony Durham, Aliette de Bodard, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and Ken Liu

I hope so.

Personal point of reference on a limitation of mimetic fiction… My first two novels were mainstream works about African-American history. Readers that picked up those books did so because they wanted to read about race and slavery. They went in knowing the material would be difficult, and most of them probably believed that ruminating about our racial history is relevant for modern day. That’s great, but it means a limited readership. What about reaching more folks-including folks that don’t think they’d be interested in reading about race?
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Editor’s note: Nebula Award nominated author Jason Sanford is now publishing a monthly column in SF Signal called To the Ends of the Universe. These columns were originally printed in the Czech SF magazine XB-1. Jason’s novelette Her Scientifiction, Far Future, Medieval Fantasy, published last year in Interzone, is now available as a Kindle ebook.

It’s time for a quick thought experiment: Without delay, imagine your favorite novel. Do you remember how you felt the first time you read it? How many times have you read this story? Does the novel continue to hold a treasured place in your heart?

For me, the first novel which pops to mind is Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. I read the novel as a child, long before I saw the Stanley Kubrick film co-written by Clarke. 2001 was the first story which truly opened my mind to the far reaches of eternity and I still love—and reread—the novel to this day.
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Recent Philip K. Dick Award nominee Jean Johnson co-headlined a new anthology edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt called Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6, writing in her Theirs Not To Reason Why military science fiction universe from which a series of novels are being released by Ace. A Soldier’s Duty came out last year and An Officer’s Duty will be out in July. “It’s Not A Game” from the Space Grunts: Full-Throttle Space Tales #3 anthology was also set in this universe. She’s also the author of The Sword, The Wolf, The Cat and The Mage, amongst other bestselling fantasy romances. To check out more of her works, visit her at www.jeanjohnson.net.

Jean wishes to acknowledge everyone who has given support to their loved ones in the military, as well as to the soldiers themselves for serving.

BTS: How did you find out about the Space Battles anthology and what made you decide to submit?

Jean Johnson: I was invited back to submit again, which was an honor. I’d originally been published before by Flying Pen Press in #3, Space Grunts, with a story set in the same universe as this one. As for how I got into Space Grunts… You know, I can’t remember? I think it was through a friend of a friend.
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Jay Sherer is the author of the illustrated time travel series, Timeslingers: Season 1. (Now available in print!) His short stories have appeared in various small-market online magazines and two science fiction anthologies (Infinite Space, Infinite God I and II). He’s currently working on Timeslingers: Season 2 while also penning a Depression Era superhero comic book series called The Standard (with ridiculously cool art by partner-in-crime, Nathan Scheck).

Is there a formula for good storytelling?

In my senior year of college I was introduced to The Screenwriter’s Workbook, a book written by Syd Field, who has devoted his life to the study of storytelling through film. In short, his answer to the question above is a resounding “yes.”

But can that approach also be utilized for other works of art? Can short story writers, novelists, and playwrights use Mr. Field’s formula? If not, are there other formulas that writers should be using?

Let’s start with a very brief overview of Mr. Field’s screenwriting model, which he calls, “the Paradigm” (link provides a PDF visual diagram).
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Paula R. Stiles has sold a heap and a peck of stories in speculative fiction, as well as a horror novel, The Mighty Quinn (due out in 2012 from Dark Continents Publishing), and a cowritten urban fantasy novel, Fraterfamilas (from Innsmouth Free Press). She is also Editor-in-Chief of Innsmouth Free Press. You can find her at: http://thesnowleopard.net.

Perhaps it goes without saying (though I will, anyway) that as an editor of Innsmouth Free Press, writer and lifetime fan of the speculative genres, I’ve read a whole lot of science fiction, fantasy and horror. I’ve read it in published form, critique groups, fanfic, and slush. No surprise, then, that I’ve seen the good, the bad, the awful, and the ugly – not always in the order of published/critique/fanfic/slush, either.
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Jay Sherer is the author of the illustrated time travel series, Timeslingers: Season 1. (Now available in print!) His short stories have appeared in various small-market online magazines and two science fiction anthologies (Infinite Space, Infinite God I and II). He’s currently working on Timeslingers: Season 2 while also penning a Depression Era superhero comic book series called The Standard (with ridiculously cool art by partner-in-crime, Nathan Scheck).

The classic newspaper serial story is dead. I saw it take two in the chest before toppling off the top of the Empire State Building. On its way down it shouted something that haunts me to this day… I’ll tell you about it in next week’s episode.

Newspaper serials may be MIA, but serial stories are alive and thriving in many other mediums (e.g. television and comic books!). As a sci-fi serial story writer, I’ve learned a lot about how to make the format work, and conversely, how to fall on my face. Here are my top five principles of serial storytelling:
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Paula R. Stiles has sold a heap and a peck of stories in speculative fiction, as well as a horror novel, The Mighty Quinn (due out in 2012 from Dark Continents Publishing), and a cowritten urban fantasy novel, Fraterfamilas (from Innsmouth Free Press). She is also Editor-in-Chief of Innsmouth Free Press. You can find her at: http://thesnowleopard.net.

People often ask me, “Why bother with multiculturalism in science fiction?” and I often reply (because I’m a smartass), “Why not?” But there are, in fact, reasons for why you need to understand and use multiculturalism in your writing if you want to become a good writer.

Standard White Anglo Saxon Protestant Guy Does Not Exist

The two-fisted, upright, straight, utterly sane SWASP male writer of science fiction does not exist. In fact, he never did exist. So, why are we defending this golden age bastion from all comers?
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Glen Cook is the author of several successful series, including ten Black Company books, fourteen Garrett P.I. books, three Starfisher books, and multiple Dread Empire Books. He has also authored numerous short fiction for anthologies and other sources. Retired from General Motors, he lives in St. Louis with his wife of forty plus years, Carol, and they travel frequently to SF conventions as booksellers and panelists. Glen is busily working on sequels to his various properties.

Bryan Thomas Schmidt talks to Glen about his career, his approach to craft and his exciting future projects with us.

SFFWRTCHT: Where did your interest in SFF come from?

Glen Cook: Kind of always been there. A next door neighbor gave me a set of Tarzan books. I found and read my dad’s copy of The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov. I was reading a lot of westerns and history but now turned to SF, devouring everything in the local library. I began trying to write my own in seventh grade. Did the Adam and Eve story right off, then something about aliens intervening in a battle between the Egyptians and Hittites on the Plain of Armageddon.
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Arc Manor/Phoenix Pick is sponsoring a writer’s workshop that features some outstanding talent. Participants include Toni Weisskopf (Head of Baen Publishing), Eleanor Wood (Spectrum Literary Agency, representing Bujold, Heinlein estate, etc.), Mike Resnick (GOH this year’s Worldcon), Kevin J. Anderson, Nancy Kress, Jack Skillingstead, Rebecca Moesta and Paul Cook.

As if that weren’t enticement enough, the 3-day workshop takes place on board a luxury cruise liner visiting the Bahamas! It takes place between December 3 and December 7, 2012. Port of embarkation/disembarkation is Miami, Florida.

Still want more? How about this: use the code SFSignal and get $100 off the registration fee at the time of signing.

Get full details at www.SailSuccess.com.