by Justin Kempton
(www.writersmugs.com)
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
| |
| Original Block Print of Mary Shelley by Justin Kempton (www.writersmugs.com) |
Aqueduct Press is pleased to announce the inauguration of its Conversation Pieces series. The first three volumes, featuring fiction by Nicola Griffith and Nancy Jane Moore and essays by L. Timmel Duchamp, were published in October 2004.
The Conversation Pieces series aims to both document and facilitate the grand conversation of feminist sf. Books in the series will offer a wide variety of texts, ranging from short fiction to essays, from speeches and poetry to interviews, correspondence, and group discussions. While many of the texts will be reprints, some will be original. Each volume will be perfect bound and priced below $10. They will be available through Aqueduct's website and at a few select bookstores.
With Her Body presents three pieces of short
fiction by the Nebula-, Lambda-, and Tiptree-award winning Nicola
Griffith.
What are these three intense stories about? Hope, joy, the body.; mainly joy and the body—feeling the world on our skin, which is the place where Us and Not-Us meet. Nicola Griffith writes about being as well as doing—about life and love and the fears that keep us from having what we want. About feeling stuff, and making decisions, not sitting at home like a passive lump.
Among the brightest stars of feminist sf, Griffith is known chiefly for her earthy yet luminous novels Ammonite, Slow River, and The Blue Place. Griffith's particular attention to physical sensation and perception imbues the prose style of With Her Body with almost palpable heat.
Nicola Griffith will be donating all the royalties for her volume to the Rehab Services of the Multiple Sclerosis Association of King County (MSA). "The MSA (www.msa-sea.org) is unique," writes Griffith. "It offers yoga and hydrotherapy classes which are specifically designed for people with MS. These classes aren't just about therapy, they're about taking joy in the body, even one that's not perfect. I want to share that joy—just as I try to in my work."
The city provides a feast for the eyes at any hour.
By day sunshine reaches almost every corner, so that
one can see the visionary architecture of the great
buildings and the lovely touches added to the simpler
structures. By night, effective use of street lights and
neon signs give the same buildings a different look,
while preserving a view of the skies from the taller
buildings. It is a place of art, of music, of beautiful
people going about their fascinating lives.
The city has its dark corners, of course, but these are not the places a tourist needs to visit and even a resident can live comfortably while (almost) ignoring them.
Maggie Hines loves this city above all else in her life. But she doesn't live there. She doesn't even know where it is.
Maggie has dreamed of the city for as long as she can remember. It feels more like home to her than her day-to-day life in Wichita Falls, Texas. She swore early on that she would go there once she found it. Changeling is the story of Maggie’s search for the city and of the barriers that stand in her way.
Nancy Jane Moore's short fiction has appeared in several anthologies, on the website Fantastic Metropolis, and in magazines ranging from Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet to the National Law Journal. She has trained in martial arts for more than twenty years and holds a black belt in Aikido. Her website is http://home.earthlink.net/~nancyjane.
Counting on Wildflowers: An Entanglement is a collection of essays, poetry, and fiction by Kim Antieau, with illustrations by Terri Windling.
Many of the pieces in this book come from Falling: A Memoir in Nature, a series of essays written beginning in March 2002, usually immediately after walking in the woods. Kim wrote the title essay in 2004 a few months after George Bush declared victory in Iraq, ignoring the fact that people were still dying because of the war. Then, in November, came Bush's reelection—despite all the lies, the dead and dying Iraqi civilians, and the torture at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Through it all, Kim kept writing her essays, trying to express her outrage. These essays serve as witness to what is happening in Iraq and in this country. They show us how to speak what we know, what we see, feel, hear, experience, even when we see no changes in the here and now. And they invite us to seek out joy—to live fully with open hearts and passionate souls, in constant communion with the Earth.
Kim Antieau is best known for her novels The Jigsaw Woman,The Gaia Websters,and Coyote Cowgirl. Charles de Lint, author of Memory and Dream writes of her work: "Brilliant....One of the best writers we have today."
In this collection of primarily environmental or
ecological fantasy; Rosaleen Love goes where other
nature writers fear to tread; she is a truly feral nature
writer. The stories play with the notion of vast
aeons of time—time as experienced (or not experienced)
differently at the various levels of being, from
the glacial to the organic, from the geological and the
ecological to the human and post-human levels.
In this book there's a special emphasis on the sea
and its stories. One story links the personal to the political,
with events in the private lives of coral polyps
impacting on their plans for world domination. Another
tale examines what happens when the creatures
of the sea take it upon themselves to pursue their
claims for sea rights.
Rosaleen Love is an Australian write who enjoys playing with wild ideas from both science and feminism. She has a special love for the sea and its stories, and a soft spot for tales about impossibly large sea monsters with political ambitions. http://users.bigpond.net.au/RosaleenLove/
The Queen of Heaven and Earth has no easy job,
not even in 3000 B.C.E. when both heaven and earth
were smaller. Even within the gates of her own city
Uruk, the far-sighted and beautiful goddess Inanna
requires the assistance of her lovers Gilgamesh
and Ninshubur. With their help, she establishes her
throne, defeats the guardian monsters of Grandfather
Wisdom to bring civilization to Uruk, and returns
alive from an ill-fated family reunion in Hell.
Ninshubur, Inanna's faithful counselor, is a woman of power and courage in her own right, but she lacks Inanna's ambition and usually finds herself on the fringe of an adventure. But the fringe is often the best vantage point for the storyteller, and, after all, this is the dreamtime of myth, when even the fringe of an adventure can feature pterodactyls, sports cars, and terrific sex.
Anne Sheldon's poetry has appeared in magazines of all stripes, including The Dark Horse,
Spanning thirty years, this volume collects six stories, one poem, and a
WisCon Guest of Honor speech. In the richly ironic "Warlords of Saturn's
Moons," first published in 1974, a cigar-puffing woman writes space-opera
while the drama of real-life inner-city Detroit goes on around her; "The
Grammarian's Five Daughters" offers a playful explication of the uses of
the parts of speech; "A Ceremony of Discontent" takes a humorous approach
to a modern-day feminist problem; and Arnason's wise, earthy tales of
hwarhath serve up new myths explaining the origins of the world and
morality (among other things). The work in this collection entertains with
its wit, delights with its precision and imagination, and challenges and
provokes with its bluntness. Ordinary People is a small, potent taste of
the oeuvre of an important author of feminist sf.
Eleanor Arnason's fourth novel, A Woman of the Iron People, won the James Tiptree Jr. Award for gender-bending science ficiton and the Mythopoeic Scoiety Award for adult fantasy. Her fifth novel, Ring of Swords, won a Minnesota Book Award. Since 1994 she has concentrated on short fiction. Her story "Dapple" won a Spectrum Award for GLBT science fiction; and she has been a finalist for the Sturgeon, Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. She lives in Minnesota.
During the 1992 Clarion West Writers Workshop attended by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, one of the students expressed the opinion that it is a mistake to write about people of ethnic backgrounds different from your own because you might get it wrong, horribly, offensively wrong, and so it is better not even to try. This opinion, commonplace among published as well as aspiring writers, struck Nisi as taking the easy way out and spurred her to write an essay addressing the problem of how to write about characters marked by racial and ethnic differences. In the course of writing the essay, however, she realized that similar problems arise when writers try to create characters whose gender, sexual preference, and age differ significantly from their own. Nisi and Cynthia collaborated to develop a workshop that addresses these problems with the aim of both increasing writers’ skill and sensitivity in portraying difference in their fiction as well as allaying their anxieties about “getting it wrong.” Writing the Other: A Practical Approach is the manual that grew out of their workshop. It discusses basic aspects of characterization and offers elementary techniques, practical exercises, and examples for helping writers create richer and more accurate characters with “differences.”
Nisi Shawl is a member of the Board of Directors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. Her stories have appeared in Semiotext(e), Asimov’s SF, Strange Horizons, and in the award-winning Dark Matter anthology series. She writes a regular book review column for The Seattle Times.
Cynthia Ward (http://www.cynthiaward.com) has published stories in Asimov's SF, Bending the Landscape: Horror, and other anthologies and magazines, and has written articles and reviews for Locus Online, SF Weekly, and other magazines and webzines. Her market-news columns appear in Speculations and The SFWA Bulletin.
Every writer worth admiring has her place of power, that locale or perspective from which she does her best and most assured work. For Rebecca Ore, it’s the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwestern Virginia. Though she has lived much of her life elsewhere, the land and its people are in her bones and the rhythm of their speech lodged in her head. It’s not an easy place to love, and she returns to it always with a certain degree of pain and regret. But it’s the forge and wellspring of Alien Bootlegger.
The Blue Ridge area is a region of stunning beauty where guns are common, old wealth holds to traditional values (“like owning people,” as Rebecca enjoys explaining), and operating an illegal still is not so much disreputable as a matter of cultural pride.—Michael Swanwick
In Franklin County, when times get tough, people often to turn to bootlegging. But that’s a perilous way to make a living, since bootlegging is both illegal and tightly regulated by distributors like Dennis DeSpain. So when the mysterious and scary alien who calls himself “Turk” openly sets up as an independent operator, flouting both the law and the distributors, all hell breaks loose. In it up to their necks and pursuing their own agendas are: ex-activist Lilly, the alien’s lawyer; Berenice, an aging ’60s radical with a past; Orris, DeSpain’s smart, ambitious wife who believes in doing whatever it takes to achieve the objective; and DeSpain’s ex-lover Marie, a chemical-engineering student who loves working with electronics and machines and whose grandmother was a midwife and bootlegger in the Forties and notorious for having killed a man.
Rebecca Ore is the critically acclaimed author of Gaia’s Toys, Outlaw School, and five other novels.
[Eve] turned her attention to the monitor displaying Minnivitch’s cell. Never had it been so clear what Minnivitch was up to. The bare minimalist space of the cell screamed stage, and some strange, dramaturgical magic had transformed the white glare of the indirect fluorescent lighting into spotlights. Kneeling bald and naked on the floor’s glassine surface, Minnivitch—her arms, wrists, hands, and fingers as dramatically expressive as her face—was telling a story to an audience somewhere outside the glare of the lights. —from The Red Rose Rages (Bleeding)Sarah Minnivitch, an actor sentenced to prison for acts of civil disobedience, wreaked havoc at the for-profit medium-security facility she was first sent to. When Penco transfers her to a high-security facility, the facility’s director assigns Dr. Eve Escher the task of rehabilitating Minnivitch and recovering the corporation’s losses. Escher believes she is on the verge of a scientific breakthrough that will not only rehabilitate the prisoner but also win the physician fame and glory. But the stakes for both Escher and Minnivitch prove to be higher than either of them imagined.
L. Timmel Duchamp has been publishing short fiction in Asimov’s SF, the Full Spectrum and Leviathan series, and numerous other magazines and anthologies since 1989. She has been a finalist for the Sturgeon and Nebula awards and has been short-listed several times for the James Tiptree, Jr Memorial Award. She is the author of a collection of short fiction, Love’s Body, Dancing in Time (2004), and a novel, Alanya to Alanya (2005).
Read L. Timmel Duchamp’s essay The Prick of Political Imagination: on Writing The Red Rose Rages (Bleeding)
Dear Abiel,
I’ve never loved a character of mine as much as I love you. I know you don’t want to hear anything like this or even a little bit like this. It’ll embarrass you. You may not read any farther, but please do go on. You can burn this letter afterwards. Nobody will ever have to know about it. I hope you’ll be, at least secretly, pleased... (Carol Emshwiller, “Love Letter to my Character, Abiel/Beal Ledoyt”)
Talking Back showcases the epistolary fantasies of eighteen writers, among whom number Carol Emshwiller, Leslie What, Eileen Gunn, and Rosaleen Love. Invited to “talk back,” the authors penned love letters, fans letters, angry letters, thoughtful letters; letters to dead people, letters to fictional characters, letters to corporations. Carol Emshwiller writes to her beloved Ledoyt; Eileen Gunn, provoked by a New York Times review of Lady Windermere’s Fan, addresses Oscar Wilde; Heather Lindsley tenders friendly advice to Citibank; and Nisi Shawl explains to Jack Kerouac that the joke is on both of them. “Lovely Madame,” writes James Trimarco to Charles Dickens’s infamous Madame Defarge, “you who eyes flash as your knitting needles click-clack at the table, I spit on the death your father has written for you and burn those pages from my book…” These are letters that will never be sent, intimate and personal, fantasies the authors have agreed to share with their readers.
…it's like being kissed by his Mam, but with an erotic edge that tingles, sends slow shockwaves through him, from the spikes on his hennaed hair to the toes suddenly clenching in his platform boots. Her mouth is wide and dry, except for a trace of saliva left behind as she disengages. She kissed me! And with an open mouth! Where are the lads from school when he needs to tell them something really important?Absolute Uncertainty collects seven stories—three of them new—by Lucy Sussex, as well as an interview conducted by Maureen Kincaid Speller. In these stories, a fashionista becomes obsessed with the uncanny resemblance of the dazzling, eccentric "Lady Sanspareille" to the seventeenth-century Duchess of Newcastle; a young man loses his virginity in more than one sense of the word; an older writer shares her insight with Philip K. Dick, who really needs it; in Biocultural Studies 101, a class examines moral ambiguities and the limits of biography in the case of Werner Heisenberg, "a real slippery customer," via a high-tech "interactive template."—from "A Sentimental, Sordid Education"
The pebble that starts the avalanche may be here, anywhere around us.
The savants of Institut Sorel, the world center of information mechanics, compute the governing algorithms that give all things their shape and structure; the voyants receive and sort enormous amounts of information. And now the savants say that the whole world, on the brink of a phase transition, is about to change, such that the long-term equilibrium that has locked the world into an "order crisis" will give way to a period of chaos. Dominique, a new, ignorant acolyte voyant, is asked to watch for the random factor that will trigger the phase transition. But the Institut itself is in chaos. Drawn into political intrigue and the savants' and voyants' struggle over his world's very future, Dominique cares for individuals, rather than abstractions and principles. But even so, he's not sure what it is he should be doing…
And as she moved, he saw that the shape of her wolverine cape described the very quadrilateral of the field, belonging to his father’s renegade vassal across the mountain, which he so long and so ineffectually had yearned to possess; and the pure launch of her skirt mimicked the very contour of the fertile hillside claimed by the Bishop of Tours, which he had not briefly, nor successfully, disputed in the ecclesiastical and secular courts, and yet could not yield his claim. He had stridden after her then, and gained upon her figure slowly, intent on capturing her for one sole galliard at least…Four spellbinding tales, selected from Wendy Walker’s critically-acclaimed short fiction collections Sea-Rabbit, Or, The Artist of Life (1988) and Stories Out of Omarie (1995), showcase some of her finest work as she takes on the themes of art, memory and tragic love in pre-modern Europe and North Africa. “Twin Knots” presents the Goddess of Love’s take on an affair between a knight and an unhappy queen. In another tale, a count punishes his daughter for the attempted murder of her husband by placing her in a barrel and sending her out to sea, where adventures with pirates and a powerful sultan ensue. Publishers Weekly writes, “Walker's sentences grow and ramify as luxuriantly as vines in an enchanted wood.”
Naomi Mitchison led a long, diverse, and active life, spanning most of the twentieth century, before she died in 1999 at the age of 101. She is probably less well-known than she might be, quite possibly because of this very diversity; a recent and favourable review of a reissue of her fantasy Travel Light, for instance, characterized her as “relegated to rare footnotes buried in the reverent biographies” of J.R.R. Tolkien…
A member of the famed Haldane family, Naomi Mitchison lived an adventurous, politically engaged, and well-examined life even as she wrote dozens of novels and works of nonfiction. From campaigning for women’s right to information about and the means of birth control to running for Parliament, from practicing “open marriage” in her own life to exploring a range of sexual arrangements and in her fiction, for all of her 101 years, Mitchison embraced change as few people ever manage to do. Along the way she pioneered a new kind of historical novel that combined the immediacy of modern language with an ability to evoke the otherness of the past with great vividness and published her first work of feminist sf in 1962, a few years before the resurgence of feminism with its second wave.
In her profile of Mitchison’s life and work, Lesley A. Hall offers an overview of this prolific writer’s life and work, beginning from her upper-class origins, through her radicalization as a feminist and socialist and her experimentation and examination of sexual arrangements, to her life as a writer repeatedly breaking new ground.
Sharp, bitter, and concentrated, it was on one square millimeter of integument surface. Exactly the size of a soldering iron head. I recoiled in terror, in blinding pain. I flew against that back wall of the lab bench. The pain quickly subsided. I turned my eyespots to the transie and watched, honing in on the soldering iron that she had mercifully unplugged and placed in a wall block, the business end inward.
“I hurt,” I said, and meant it.
A tale set in the not-so-distant future when robots with AI serve nearly every human household, We, Robots is the story of Avey, a robot who undergoes a forced transition from emotionless domestic servant to conflicted human companion. Two weeks prior to the long-anticipated arrival of the Singularity—the moment when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence—old robot models are recalled for the installation of a security upgrade that would allow the growing transhuman population to control them through instilling in them the ability to feel pain. This new feature introduces Avey to a cruel, unjust world, engendering a range of human emotions that include sadness, anger, compassion, and love. As robots across the globe collectively discover what it is to be human through the experience of suffering and longing, they inevitably begin to question their exploited existence. Will their joint uprising spoil the transhumans’ grand social experiment and release them from a life of servitude?
Even as she talks, she is assessing his lack of composure, his evident ineffectualness in his slouch and dumbfounded expression…. “You see my dilemma. I find myself without a history, and I need someone to fill it in for me. Additionally, I will need some kind of personal quirk, because such things make for convincing fictions.” She pauses, and adds philosophically, “If the world really were populated by fictional characters we would none of us understand each other for our compelling eccentricities.”
With Making Love in Madrid, Kimberly Todd Wade makes her fictional debut. Anna Tambour, author of The Spotted Lily and Monterra’s Deliciosa and Other Tales, describes the novella as “a fantasia of amnesia, of lives that need filling, of writers of every tense, of talent and dry lemons and melted cheese; of giggling and tangled sheets and denture adhesive, competition and tenderness, a bloodless bullfight, the power of a giant smile to diminish greatness—a modern mannerist story around a story.
At age seventeen, Arun, the narrator of Of Love and Other Monsters, emerges from a fire, his
memories and identity vanished with the flames. He finds a refuge and home with Janani and
soon discovers his unique ability to sense and manipulate the minds of others around him.
Intimately connected yet isolated by this insight, he inhabits a dangerous place outside
conventional boundaries: man/woman, mind/body. When someone who shares his ability, Rahul
Moghe, arrives on his doorstep, he senses a power beyond any he has known. Janani warns of
the grave danger posed by Rahul and sends Arun on his journey, fleeing the one person who
may have answers to the mystery of his past...
Aliens of the Heart collects four stories of the heartland by Carolyn Ives Gilman. In these
stories, Betty Lindstrom imagines leaving her husband in the town of Lost Road and turning
east instead of west out of town and never coming back, but when she does drive west with her
husband, alone with the prairie and the wind, she can’t get home; Susan Abernathy undertakes
to humanize Captain Groton, the alien charged with removing the residents of Okanoggan Falls,
WI, with consequences she could not have imagined; Galena Pittman seeks to recover her lover,
Thea, from the mountains of Montana, where she devotes herself to literally painting the
landscape under the direction of the mysterious Dirigo; and the Conservator, charged with
preserving the many layers of the map of the great river “on whose surface the past was written
in cipher,” discovers that the relationship between map and landscape is more complicated than
she had thought. “The Conservator” is original to the volume. “Frost Painting” and “Okanoggan
Falls” appeared in Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology series.