Like Me. Friend Me!

I find it so funny that a few short months ago Facebook was not my friend. Not at all. I definitely didn’t “like” FB. When I first created a profile it sat there. I rarely posted. I mean for months. Sometimes I’d go on and make a brief comment on a post by one of my “friends”. I didn’t get FB, and using it confused me. Months would go by and I wouldn’t event visit FB.

Fast forward a couple of years and FB is now my friend. I talked about my use of FB as an author. Now I’m having great fun as a reader. I joined several FB groups. Two are readers groups that invited me (and other authors). Two are authors groups networking and sharing information. The other group is a hybrid of sorts. Reading In Black was started by author Deatri King-Bey. But the group is also for readers. Of course we authors are major readers/book geeks as well. The over arching goal of the group is to discuss mystery, thriller, horror, Sci-Fi, fantasy and paranormal novels written by and about POC (people of color).



I’ve discovered a long list of authors writing books I didn’t know existed. One example Steampunk written by and featuring POC. I didn’t know! I also have fallen in love with a genre called Sword and Soul – epic fantasy based on African traditions, culture and history. My first taste Griots, an anthology. I’m in love (huge Game of Thrones fanatic).

Since Fringe and Person of Interest debuted their fall season first episodes 9/28, those of us who are fans geeked out to discuss the story lines, actors, scripts and more. I’ve also been buying thrillers, mystery and paranormal novels. We discuss movies, so it’s not just about books. Though there is a lot of book talk. Saturday night (9/29) someone posted that Lake Placid, The Final Chapter would be on the SyFy channel. Spontaneously several of us started posting hilarious comments on FB while watching (silly dialogue, too stupid to live characters, who gets eaten first, etc.)

So I invite readers of the genres we read and write to stop by and consider joining up. We’re not just having a blast, but you’ll be able learn about wonderful books.
I’m writing a book I want to be on sale for the holidays. Now I have to make myself stay away from FB. 360 degree change. Seriously.

Guest editor Eric T. Reynolds: What Are the Bounds of Speculative Fiction?

Eric T. Reynolds is Editor/Publisher ofHadley Rille Books, a publisher of fantasy, science fiction, and archaeology fiction. Hadley Rille just celebrated five years in publishing. Eric has edited over 30 books over the past five years, many of which have received critical acclaim. He is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, has had fiction published by small press and nonfiction published by science-related publications. Visit him on Facebook “Eric T Reynolds” and his blog,ericreynolds.livejournal.com. 


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Several authors I've worked with and I recently had a long conversation that could have been titled: "What is speculative fiction?" We were focusing on what might be called the fringe of speculative fiction, that gray area where fiction strays close to the borders of mainstream.

What about stories that don't have any of the tropes of speculative fiction?  Science fiction author James Gunn's definition of science fiction includes stories that deal with the human condition, and how humans interact with nature.  Such stories might include castles and spaceships, but many stories may not be recognizable at all as speculative fiction.

At Hadley Rille Books, where I serve as editor/publisher, we publish a series archaeology-correct novels about common people who lived during ancient times.  These are being written by archaeologists and anthropologists.  So while we love the non-mundane, we have found a place for the mundane as well, which we think fits within the speculative fiction genre.  The exploration of the ancient world is full of drama, discovery, and excitement, and involves the exploration of other worlds, worlds vastly different from what most of us experience today.

Take for example K.L. Townsend's Song of the Swallow (which we will release in December of 2011), a book set during the collapse of the Southern Song Dynasty in China during the 1200s CE.  The story follows the struggles of a young woman who is taken from her home to serve as a concubine in the Emperor's palace.  She has a horrible life there, but during that time she manages to befriend another woman, form a sisterhood, and grow as a person.  She is subjected to a way of life that should never be experienced by anyone, but as a human being manages to explore ways to overcome and perhaps escape her predicament.  Townsend explores many aspects of the human condition and her knowledge as an anthropologist allows her to speculate about human life during that time.

Another example is anthropologist Shauna Roberts’s Like Mayflies in a Stream, which although it’s based on the fantastic account, The Epic of Gilgamesh, it speculates (also based on current archaeological and historical knowledge) how people lived in ancient Mesopotamia.  She took care to show us what their daily lives were like, how they performed ceremonies, how their society treated women, and what kinds of conflicts they had.  She shows us the most accurate portrayal of daily life in Mesopotamia as it may have been over 4000 years ago.

In classicist Jenny Blackford’s The Priestess and the Slave, we follow the lives and deaths of common people who endured the Plague of Athens nearly 2500 years ago in ancient Greece.  We learned how they cooked, how they mourned their losses, what their dwellings were like, what they believed in and how those beliefs drove their actions for coping during bad times.  Again, Blackford worked from her extensive knowledge and study of that culture and from her efforts, we get to follow a very real and riveting drama of the people who lived through those times.

Taken individually or taken as a whole, novels such as these accomplish many goals of speculative fiction.  The very word “speculative” is the basis of stories like these, speculation based on knowledge and discovery about different snapshots of the human past.  What we find is that people are alike all over whether geographic or temporal.

To a casual browser in a bookstore, these books won’t strike him or her as speculative fiction.  But when a story explores the bounds of human endurance and enters the realm of the distant past (which is a different world), it may be seen as mainstream.  But we really know it’s a speculative fiction story.  And it seems that speculative fiction has a much bigger audience than many of us realize.

Vandana Singh's "The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet"

I was delighted to receive a small shipment of books from Small Beer Press recently. And doubly delighted to discover that one of the stories in the "trampoline" anthology was by Vandana Singh. I was intensely curious, you see. What is one Indian's take on speculative fiction, especially when that Indian is female?

Well, firstly, I'll be looking for more work from Singh. There's such a delightful aura of sly playfulness about her prose that it had me smiling through the entire tale. And the description of the marriage between Kamala and her husband, Ramnath, was portrayed so well and so succinctly, I could almost smell and see their living room in my mind.

But, here's the thing. Is the tale of a middle-aged, Establishment mother and woman who actually believes herself to be a planet, speculative fiction? I ask the same question of Iain Banks' work from time to time as well. Is using a metaphysical or otherworldly element in a work of literature enough to catapult it to the realm of sf? After all, we know nothing of the aliens that infest Kamala to the extent that she believes herself to be a planet. We don't know their purpose or motivations, and Kamala's own motivations, beyond a sense of cheerful wonder, are as filmy as the layers of her sari. And the ending is decidedly mythic, if anything.

I sit and wonder if Singh could have used another strategy to say what she wanted to say in the story. (Probably not, I decide.) I sit and wonder what exactly Singh is trying to say in her story? Is it an exposition of a (hopefully) disappearing, chauvinistic way of life in middle-class India? A masterfully illustrated battle between face and feeling? An examination of the gulf between a man and woman, with the roles of their respective lives laid out with such rigidity that, for Ramnath at least, even the bending of his role is quite beyond him? Am I to glean the fact that, perhaps, where the personality has less power, there is actually greater freedom to break free of societal bonds?

It's clear that Singh considers herself a speculative fiction writer (there's a wonderful interview with her at Bookslut, but to what end? I'm quite open to the suggestion that my questions are a reflection of my own upbringing, and it could well be that I'm taking a much too mechano-centric view of the speculative fiction field. Singh references Ursula K le Guin, so I'm willing to cop to an accusation of having too narrow a view of a vast and wonderfully diverse vista.

And that is why speculative fiction is such a wonderful area to get lost in. I've been reading sf for decades now, and it still never loses its ability to shake me up, to show me another facet of itself, and demand that I attempt to understand. I may not always succeed in seeing through to the core truth, but the tangents themselves are more than worth the journey. Thank you, Ms Singh.