Alien Encounters of the Thrilling Kind

I'll admit it - I've been popping over to Prime Books about twice a day ever since my story Nullipara was accepted for one of their upcoming anthologies just to see if they'd announced the TOC for Aliens: Recent Encounters yet. I was, naturally enough, curious about the company I would be keeping. Tonight I came home to an email from Thoraiya Dyer kindly pointing me towards editor Alex Dally MacFarlane's announcement of said TOC and cover reveal.

OMG. WOW. Unbelievable! Just feast your eyes upon the following very cool cover :

 And the TOC, just look at it!!!!:

An Owomoyela - Frozen Voice
Ken Liu - The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species
Catherynne M. Valente - Golubash, or Wine-Blood-War-Elegy
Zen Cho - The Four Generations of Chang E
Vandana Singh - The Tetrahedon
Paul McAuley - The Man
Ursula K. Le Guin - Seasons of the Ansarac
Molly Gloss - Lambing Season
Desirina Boskovich - Celadon
Genevieve Valentine - Carthago Delenda Est
Caitlín R. Kiernan - I Am the Abyss and I Am the Light
Jamie Barras - The Beekeeper
Robert Reed - Noumenon
Elizabeth Bear - The Death of Terrestial Radio
Sofia Samatar - Honey Bear
Karin Lowachee - The Forgotten Ones
Jeremiah Tolbert - The Godfall's Chemsong
Alastair Reynolds - For the Ages
Brooke Bolander - Sun Dogs
Nisi Shawl - Honorary Earthling
Samantha Henderson - Shallot
Sonya Taaffe - The Boy Who Learned How to Shudder
Eleanor Arnason - Knacksack Poems
Gitte Christensen - Nullipara
Indrapramit Das - muo-ka's Child
Jeffrey Ford - The Dismantled Invention of Fate
Karin Tidbeck - Jagannath
Pervin Saket - Test of Fire
Nancy Kress - My Mother, Dancing
Greg van Eekhout - Native Aliens
Lavie Tidhar - Covenant
Yoon Ha Lee - A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel

Now I have to go sit down and fan myself. I mean, I'm going to be in an anthology with Ursula K. Le Guin! And all those other fantastic and prominent and clever writers I've read and admired for years. This is heady stuff for me. Looking at this list, I'm wondering how the heck I snuck in. Not that Nullipara isn't a good story, mind you... :)

OMG. WOW. Unbelievable!

A Prime Piece of Pre-Christmas News

A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting around trying to come up with an idea that I could turn into a zombie story for an upcoming antho, because, well, it would be so cool to get into a Prime Books anthology, when in comes an email...

It was another one of those situations where I was pretty much expecting a rejection, so it took a few seconds to absorb the fact that this email was actually one of those happiness inducing 'yay' responses rather that one of the more common 'nays'. I'd sent off, as per the guidelines, the maximum of three alien encounter stories, and wouldn't you know it, the one I wasn't sure about, the one I almost second-guessed myself out of sending, made it!

So yes, here comes the news I've been dying to share - my science fiction story Nullipara, which was first published in 2010 in The Tangled Bank: Love, Wonder, and Evolution edited by Chris Lynch, will appear in the reprint anthology Aliens: Recent Encounters edited by Alex Dally MacFarlane. It's scheduled for publication in June 2013.

The final lineup will be announced later this week, I've been told, or the following week, but I've been given permission to make my own private announcement now.

Inclusion in a Prime Books anthology is certainly a fantastic early Xmas present, and knowing I'll soon have an SF story in a book with the word 'alien' in the title is as geekily festive as it gets.

Bloody Printers

Alas, over at Tangled Bank Press you can read:

Unfortunately, the print edition has had to be recalled.
Anyone who has bought a defective copy will have their copy replaced free of charge–please contact TBP with your proof of purchase.
Hopefully it won’t be too long before the print edition is available again.

Bloody printers stuffing up is something I usually only have to deal with in the Real World.

*sigh*

Yay, yay, it's Darwin Day

Which means the print edition of The Tangled Bank: Love, Wonder, and Evolution is FINALLY out!

Chris Lynch informs us that the book is slowly making its way through the bowels of various online retailers, including Amazon.com. In the meantime, the print version is available from Lulu.com for US$24.95 + postage.

All the details are on the Tangled Bank Press website: http://tangledbankpress.com.au/. Readers can read both the introduction and Christopher Green's story Darwin's Daughter for free. In addition, readers who buy a print copy in the next month will receive the ebook for free. Yes FREE!!! There's even a competition - you can win a copy of the ebook by following @thetangledbank on Twitter.

Chris Lynch has also posted an interview with Sean Williams about his haiku sequence The Origin of Haiku By Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Renga in the Struggle for Meaning, around which the anthology is structured. It provides a map of Darwin’s book Origin of Species, chapter by chapter, using Darwin's own phrases to capture the arguments he was working through, while at the same time illustrating the evolution of the haiku form down the centuries.

Anyway, get your copy now. You won't be sorry,

It takes two to tangle

So I started the week with the great news that the print version of The Tangled Bank is coming out next month, saw the Disney movie Tangled yesterday, and in between wrote a post about entangled electrons inside bird brains. My pattern recognition system is picking up a trend here. And what does it all mean? Nothing, of course, but magical thinking is always looking for ways to take over one's thoughts.

And the movie? I enjoyed it. I especially enjoyed the not-at-all-subtle criticism of overprotective parents who transfer their own dark fears based on their own bad experiences of the life onto their children, who use psychological manipulations and emotional blackmail to the point where they're actually imprisoning their offspring and preventing them from exploring the world, who make all the decisions and thereby deny their kiddies of the opportunity to engage in the often painful process of making mistakes, who, simply put, be their motives good, selfish, based on martyrdom or a need for control, stop their kids from growing up. Rapunzel's tower - seriously symbolic. All this, and pretty flowers and twittering bluebirds too.

The characters? As far as I'm concerned, the sidekicks stole the show. Pascal the smart-assy chameleon with a touch of darkness in his little heart, and Maximus the sword-wielding, übermilitary, bloodhound x palace guard horse.

Now, enough with the procrastination. Back to work *cracks the whip* . There's a dark, political ghost story that needs another round of polishing so I can send it off tonight.

The Tangled Bank - print version

In a great start to the week, I got an email from Chris Lynch this morning announcing that there will, after all, be a print version of the anthology The Tangled Bank: Love, Wonder, and Evolution, which includes my SF story Nullipara.

I'm so glad. It's such a big, beautiful book, with great stories and amazing artwork. Chris will be sending more news about the launch and how to get a copy of the print version over the next few weeks. Anyway, here's the blurb:

Christopher Lynch
Publisher/Editor
Tangled Bank Press
Website: http://thetangledbank.com/
Join us on Facebook and Twitter

The Tangled Bank: Love, Wonder, and Evolution

What does evolution mean? Marking the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s Origin of Species, The Tangled Bank: Love, Wonder, and Evolution is bursting with stories, poetry, and full-page artwork about the meaning of evolution. From science fiction and fantasy, to comedy and horror, to fairy tales and literary fiction, this anthology has a story for everyone.

An international lineup of more than 40 contributors includes Sean Williams, Brian Stableford, Patricia Russo, Carlos Hernandez, Jetse de Vries, Christopher Green, Bruce Boston, and Emily Ballou. Dark, whimsical, and shot through with wonder, The Tangled Bank explores the universe Charles Darwin revealed.

Available now as an e-book, and in print on 12th Feb 2011. To get your copy, visit http://thetangledbank.com.

Bleating Hearts

A lovely, lazy day today. Since Monday is a public holiday here in Victoria, one can slow down a little and smell the roses – or buy books. I’m quite please with today’s coup. I bought a couple of books by a writer I’ve been meaning to read for a long time – Holly Black. Many sing her praises, so when I saw a nice hardback copy of Ironside, I grabbed it. Then I found Valiant, and scooped it up too. Officially, I’m not buying new books this year, or at least not until the book table stops sagging under the weight of unread tomes, but in cases like this, well, you have to make an exception.

Last night, I went to St Kilda, my old stomping ground, and caught a movie at the George. It was just like ye olde tymes.

I was expecting The Men Who Stare at Goats to be an exposé of psychic charlatanism and a scathing indictment of army incompetence, full of cynicism and derision and soldierly pratfalls, and though the film did have much mocking of the military, I was surprised to find it at heart a rather affectionate tribute to a group of well-meaning men who just wanted to end wars and make the world a better place. That their methods were somewhat outlandish is beside the point. Ridicule is easy – any cooler than cool but essentially ineffectual numskull can bag oddballs and nonconformists. To recognize the Don Quixotes of the world and portray their lunacy sympathetically, that takes empathy and talent.

It was, however, rather disconcerting to hear Jedi jargon falling from the lips of a wild-eyed George Clooney and a spaced-out Jeff Bridges.

And now, this news from the Tangle Bank Press:

The ePub edition of The Tangled Bank: Love, Wonder, and Evolution has just been released on Lulu.com for only $4.99. For anyone who likes to read ebooks on their iPhone or iPod Touch, this is the version for you. The ePub edition includes all content from the PDF edition in flowing text format.
Want both ePub and PDF? No problem: purchase of any digital edition includes the other digital edition free of charge. Lulu.com doesn’t yet support single purchase of multiformat editions, but simply forward your proof of purchase of a digital edition to thetangledbank (AT) gmail.com and we’ll send you the book in your requested format.
If you’d like to read the anthology in other formats such as .LIT or .MOBI (not supported on Lulu), we recommend purchasing the ePub edition and using the free e-reader Calibre to convert to your preferred format.

* The print version will be available 31st March 2010. (Yoo-hooo)

Oh, and I got the final proofs for ‘A Sweet Story’ today, and a contract, so it looks like things are moving with Moonlight Tuber.

Zeus alors!

This morning, I indulged my inner teenager with ‘Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief’. As an aficionado of anything with giant, squabbling, Olympian gods, minotaurs, snake-haired ladies and many-headed monsters, I couldn’t have asked for a more mottled mythological mélange.

Throw in a few manly men in body-hugging armour and skirts (luv yas Sean Bean and Kevin McKidd) and aaahhh, matinée heaven.

Now, as this weekend’s only contribution to my writing "career", I’ll send off a few stories (this week’s rejections), as tomorrow will be a dawn to dusk riding day.

And by the way, have I mentioned that Chris Lynch's 'The Tangled Bank: Love, Wonder and Evolution' is out now? It's a beautiful book.

Roll up, roll up...

The Tangled Bank: Love, Wonder, & Evolution has launched! The anthology, which marks the 150th anniversary of Origin of Species, features over 100,000 words of speculative fiction, poetry, artwork, and essays about evolution.

An international line-up of nearly 50 contributors includes Sean Williams, Brian Stableford, Patricia Russo, and Carlos Hernandez (and me!!!!)

Just US$4.99, The Tangled Bank is now available for download as a PDF at http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/the-tangled-bank-love-wonder-and-evolution/8340048

Check out "Darwin's Daughter" by Christopher Green (a free short story from the anthology)http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/darwins-daughter/8339953

And, should you feel inclined to do so, might I humbly submit that you should also take a peek at 'Nullipara'. It was many years in the making, and I'm so glad it has found a place in such illustrious company.

Now, if you'll all excuse me, I'm off to browse through my complimentary contributor's copy.

Darwin Day

And now it's tomorrow. Which means it's Darwin Day. Which means it's the launch day of 'The Tangled Bank: Love, Wonder and Evolution.' Which means my SF story 'Nullipara' will be out there for all the world to read, along with the stories, poems and artwork of other (far, far better known) folk as well, of course. Which means I'm a tad excited.

The Tangled Bank: Love, Wonder and Evolution

An exciting piece of pre-Christmas news for me was that my story ‘Nullipara’ will be included in the upcoming anthology ‘The Tangled Bank: Love, Wonder and Evolution’ edited by Christopher Lynch.

It will be available in both print and electronic form.

I was the very last person to be accepted, and am honoured to have snuck in between the covers.

In 2008, I did a workshop with Sean Williams at the Victorian Writers' Centre, so I'm especially pleased to find myself sharing a ToC with the Master himself.