READING ROUND-UP: October, 2019

Better late than never! Continuing the monthly summaries of what I’ve been reading and writing.

BOOKS

To keep my numbers consistent with what I have listed on Goodreads, I count completed magazine issues and stand-alone short stories in e-book format as “books.” I read or listened to 15 books in September: 10 in print, 3 in e-book format, and 2 in audio. They were:

1.       Lightspeed Magazine #113 (October 2019 issue), edited by John Joseph Adams. The usual fine assortment of sf and fantasy short stories. This month’s favorites for me were Isabel Yap’s “Windrose in Scarlet,” Ray Nayler’s “The Death of Fire Station 10,” and Sam J. Miller’s “The Beasts We Want To Be.”

2.       Shadow of Doubt by Linda Poitevin. I love Poitevin’s “Grigori Legacy” urban fantasy series. She writes equally fun and compelling romantic thrillers. This one is about a local Canadian cop who falls in with an on-the-run US customs agent to solve who framed him and why.

3.       Simon Says (John Simon Thrillers #1) by Bryan Thomas Schmidt. Schmidt’s new near-future police procedural thriller is a fun ride full of car chases, gun fights, and solid character development. Read my longer review HERE.

4.       Tomb of Dracula: The Complete Collection Volume 1, by Marv Wolfman, Gene Colan, Tom Palmer and more. Tomb of Dracula is my favorite horror comic of all time, and possibly my favorite comic overall. Despite a rotating group of writers and artists, the early issues collected here set the stage for the great character developments that would come later. And for the first time, I think, the black-and-white Dracula Lives! Magazine stories are folded in close to publication order.

5.       The Girl on the Porch by Richard Chizmar.  A really compelling horror novel about a family dealing with the possibility that a missing girl rang their doorbell in the middle of the night and then disappeared again. High tension throughout.

6.       The Horla by Guy de Maupassant. Melville House’s re-issue of the horror classic includes two earlier versions of the story written by the author. An excellent study in how an idea develops in different iterations.

7.       Tomb of Dracula: The Complete Collection Volume 2, by Marv Wolfman, Gene Colan, Tom Palmer and more. Continuing the reprints of both the color Tomb of Dracula comic and the black-and-white Dracula Lives! Magazine.

8.       Deosil (Whyborne & Griffin #11) by Jordan L. Hawk. Another series I’m sad to see end with this installment. Hawk’s blending of Lovecraftian horror with gay paranormal historical romance has been pitch-perfect throughout the run, and this final volume wraps up all the major and supporting plots satisfactorily.

9.       Rosemary and Rue (Tenth Anniversary Edition) by Seanan McGuire. My first re-read of the very first October Daye installment proved to me just how much of the series McGuire had planned from the beginning. Almost every chapter has some wink or nod towards things that will be revealed later on. There’s also a new novella at the back of this hardcover re-release, in which we finally get to see how Toby became a Knight in the service of Sylvester Torquill and how she found the Queen’s new Knowe, both events having occurred before the events of this first novel.

10.   Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand. A perfect novella for the Halloween season: the story of a band and the haunted house they spend a summer in, told in a “Behind the Music” talking heads documentary style. I can’t believe this one hasn’t been adapted to movie form given the obvious overlap of music and the supernatural. I just realized there’s a multi-reader audiobook version that I’ll be listening to as soon as possible.

11.   Tomb of Dracula: The Complete Collection Volume 3, by Marv Wolfman, Gene Colan, Tom Palmer and more. Continuing the reprints of both the color Tomb of Dracula comic and the black-and-white Dracula Lives! Magazine.

12.   Come Tumbling Down (Wayward Children #5) by Seanan McGuire. McGuire returns to the Portal world of the Moors in a story that builds on elements from the first and second books in the series. The Moors is my favorite of the Portal worlds the author has created for this series, and I was not disappointed to return there. I read an ARC. The book is due out in early January 2020. My Full Review HERE.

13.   Absolution (Serena Darkwood Adventures #1) by Charles F.  Millhouse. This is a really enjoyable new “dirty SF” book – meaning we get immersed in the criminal underbelly of this new interstellar world Millhouse has created. The main characters are engaging, the alien races intriguing, and the audiobook a fun listen. Looking forward to more of Serena’s adventures.

14.   Songs of Giants by Mark Wheatley. Editor Mark Wheatley gathers a variety of poems written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft for various pulp magazines and adds his own original and stunning artwork that brings the poems to life.

15.   A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny. My annual re-read of the battle between Openers and Closers for the fate of the world, narrated by a demon in dog form who becomes best friend with a cat. Featuring a lot of recognizable horror and mystery characters. Just a fun read, and I always pick up on a new or somehow forgotten detail.

STORIES

I have a goal of reading 365 short stories (1 per day, essentially, although it doesn’t always work out that way) each year. Here’s what I read this month and where you can find them if you’re interested in reading them too. If no source is noted, the story is from the same magazine or book as the story(ies) that precede(s) it:

1.       “The Beasts We Want to Be” by Sam J. Miller, from Lightspeed Magazine #113 (October 2019 issue), edited by John Joseph Adams.

2.       “Nesting Habits of Enceladen Beetles” by Eli Brown

3.       “Revival” by WC Dunlap

4.       “The Death of Fire Station 10” by Ray Nayler

5.       “The Valley of the Wounded Deer” by E. Lily Yu

6.       “<<Legendaire.>>” by Kai Ashante Wilson

7.       “Windrose in Scarlet” by Isabel Yap

8.       “The Words of Our Enemies, The Wards of Our Hearts” by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor

9.       “Take The Shot” by Seanan McGuire, on the author’s Patreon page.

10.   “Strangers in Court” by Seanan McGuire, included in the hardcover 10th Anniversary edition of Rosemary and Rue.

11.   “On Full Moon Nights” by Idza Luhumyo, from The Dark #53, October 2019, edited by Silva Moreno-Garcia

12.   “Every Exquisite Thing” by Lynda E. Rucker

13.   “Authentic Zombies of the Caribbean” by Ana Maria Shua, translated by Andrea G. Labinger

14.   “The Demon L” by Carly Holmes

15.   “The Maw” by Nathan Ballingrud, from Nightmare #85, October 2019, edited by John Joseph Adams

16.   “Some Kind of Blood-Soaked Future” by Carlie St. George

So that’s 16 short stories in October, keeping me way ahead for the year so far. (October 30th was the 303rd day of 2019.)

Summary of Reading Challenges:

“To Be Read” Challenge: This month: 0 read; YTD: 3 of 14 read.

365 Short Stories Challenge: This month:  16 read; YTD: 364 of 365 read.

Graphic Novels Challenge:  This month: 3 read; YTD: 26 of 52 read.

Goodreads Challenge: This month: 15 read; YTD: 118 of 125 read.

Non-Fiction Challenge: This month: 0; YTD: 5 of 24 read.

Read the Book / Watch the Movie Challenge: This month: 0; YTD: 0 of 10 read/watched.

Complete the Series Challenge: This month: 0 books read; YTD: 0 of 16 read.

                                                                Series fully completed: 0 of 3 planned

Monthly Special Challenge: I may not do something like this every month but October’s mini-goal was Horror, Horror, Horror!. I did pretty well: 7 of the titles I read I would count as part of the horror genre (possibly 8, as the Whyborne and Griffin series, while technically paranormal historical romance, has Lovecraftian horror elements to it).

November’s mini-goal of course is: Crime/Mystery/Noir because it is Noirvember!

Reading Round-Up: July 2019

Continuing the monthly summaries of what I’ve been reading and writing. (This one’s a bit overdue!)

BOOKS

To keep my numbers consistent with what I have listed on Goodreads, I count completed magazine issues and stand-alone short stories in e-book format as “books.” I read or listened to 7 books in July: 2 in print, 5 in e-book format, and 0 in audio. They were:

1.       Lightspeed Magazine #110 (July 2019 issue), edited by John Joseph Adams. The usual fine assortment of sf and fantasy short stories. This month’s favorites for me were Andrew Penn Romine’s “Miles and Miles and Miles,” Indrapramit Das’s “The Moon Is Not a Battlefield,” J. Anderson Coats’ “Mother Carey’s Table,” and Senaa Ahmad’s “Ahura Yazda, The Great Extraordinary.”

2.       Ormeshadow by Priya Sharma. You would think that as an English major in college, I’d have read something, anything, by Willa Cather. But if I did, I don’t recall it at all (please forgive me, Professor Malcolm Marsden!). So I’m counting this as my first Cather work. I’d like to read more by her eventually. I found this one an interesting character study. Full Review HERE.

3.       Sealed by Naomi Booth. An interesting combination of near-future environmental horror, graphic body horror, and a potentially unreliable narrator. Not for the easily squeamish, for sure. Full review appeared at Strange Horizons on August 30th.  http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/sealed-by-naomi-booth/

4.       Treasure Trail, by Morgan Brice. This is the first M/M urban fantasy/paranormal romance by Gail Z. Martin’s pen name that I have read, and it won’t be the last. This, the first in a new series, takes place in very haunted Cape May, NJ and introduces us to an antique shop owner with “the touch” (the ability to sense an object’s supernatural history) and a former cop turned rental property manager who sees ghosts. There’s also present- and past-day Mafia connections, because NJ.

5.       A Secret Guide to Fighting Elder Gods edited by Jennifer Brozek. A really fun anthology of Lovecraftian Young Adult stories. The stories hit all the requisite Lovecraft themes and monsters, but with settings mostly in the present day focusing on teens – and often, on teens seeing what the adults can’t or won’t see.

6.       The Trans Space Octopus Congregation by Bogi Takács. Bogi’s newest short story collection, due out from Lethe Press in October, has a wonderful mix of science fiction and fantasy, including a few stories set in a shared future setting. Eir stories touch on many present day issues, including the immigrant, transgender, and “alternate sexuality” experiences. A great read.

7.       The Triumph of the Spider-Monkey by Joyce Carol Oates. Not going to lie, this was a very difficult read for me. Long out of print and brought back by Hard Case Crime, this is a very disturbing look inside the head of a serial killer.

STORIES

I have a goal of reading 365 short stories (1 per day, essentially, although it doesn’t always work out that way) each year. Here’s what I read this month and where you can find them if you’re interested in reading them too. If no source is noted, the story is from the same magazine or book as the story(ies) that precede(s) it:

1.       “The Null Space Conundrum” by Violet Allen, from Lightspeed Magazine #110 (July 2019 issue), edited by John Joseph Adams.

2.       “The Mysteries” by Karen Lord

3.       “Miles and Miles and Miles” by Andrew Penn Romine

4.       “The Moon Is Not A Battlefield” by Indrapramit Das

5.       “Mother Carey’s Table” by J. Anderson Coats

6.       “Sand Castles” by Adam-Troy Castro

7.       “Song Beneath the City” by Micah Dean Hicks

8.       “Ahura Yazda, The Great Extraordinary” by Senaa Ahmad

9.       “Face Your Furs” by Seanan McGuire, on the author’s Patreon page.

10.   “The Good Girl” by Lucy Snyder, on the author’s Patreon page.

11.   “Freak Corner” by John Rolfe Gardiner, from One Story #254, edited by Patrick Ryan

12.   “The Story of O-Tei” by Lafcadio Hearn, from Oriental Ghost Stories, edited by David Stuart Davies

13.   “Green Glass: A Love Story” by E. Lily Yu, from If This Goes On: The Science Fiction Future of Today’s Politics, edited by Cat Rambo

14.   “The Last Adventure of Jack Laff: The Dayveil Gambit” by Steven Barnes

15.   “King Harvest (Will Surely Come)” by Nisi Shawl

16.   “Away Game” by Seanan McGuire, from A Secret Guide To Fighting Elder Gods, edited by Jennifer Brozek

17.   “The Icarus Club” by Weston Ochse

18.   “Stormy Monday” by Chesya Burke

19.   “Pickman’s Daughter” by J.C. Koch

20.   “Us and Ours” by Premee Mohamed

21.   “The Art of Dreaming” by Josh Vogt

22.   “Visions of the Dream Witch” by Lucy A. Snyder

23.   “The Tall Ones” by Stephen Ross

24.   “Just Imagine” by Tim Waggoner

25.   “Holding Back” by Lisa Morton

26.   “The Mouth of the Merrimack” by Douglas Wynne

27.   “The Geometry of Dreams” by Wendy N. Wagner

28.   “Being Emily-Claire” by Jonathan Maberry

29.   “This Shall Serve As A Demarcation” by Bogi Takács, from The Trans Space Octopus Congregation, edited by Steve Berman

30.   “Some Remarks on the Reproductive Strategies of the Common Octopus” by Bogi Takács

31.   “A Superordinate Set of Principles” by Bogi Takács

32.   “Forestspirit, Forestspirit” by Bogi Takács

33.   “Given Sufficient Desperation” by Bogi Takács

34.   “Changing Body Templates” by Bogi Takács

35.   “For Your Optimal Hookboarding Experience” by Bogi Takács

36.   “Increasing Police Visibility” by Bogi Takács

37.   “Good People in a Small Space” by Bogi Takács

38.   “Records of a More Personal Nature” by Bogi Takács

39.   “This Secular Technology” by Bogi Takács

40.   “Three Partitions” by Bogi Takács

41.   “Unifications” by Bogi Takács

42.   “The Size of A Barleycorn, Encased in Lead” by Bogi Takács

43.   “To Rebalance the Body” by Bogi Takács

44.   “Shovelware” by Bogi Takács

45.   “The Oracle of DARPA” by Bogi Takács

46.   “Toward the Luminous Towers” by Bogi Takács

47.   “Wind-lashed Vehicles of Bone” by Bogi Takács

48.   “The Need for Overwhelming Sensation” by Bogi Takács

49.   “Spirit Forms of the Sea” by Bogi Takács

50.   “All Talk of Common Sense” by Bogi Takács

51.   “Standing on the Floodbanks” by Bogi Takács

So that’s 51 short stories in July, keeping me way ahead for the year so far. (July 30th was the 212th day of 2019.)

Summary of Reading Challenges:

“To Be Read” Challenge: This month: 0 read; YTD: 3 of 14 read.

365 Short Stories Challenge: This month:  51 read; YTD: 291 of 365 read.

Graphic Novels Challenge:  This month: 0 read; YTD: 17 of 52 read.

Goodreads Challenge: This month: 7 read; YTD: 78 of 125 read.

Non-Fiction Challenge: This month: 0; YTD: 5 of 24 read.

Read the Book / Watch the Movie Challenge: This month: 0; YTD: 0 of 10 read/watched.

Complete the Series Challenge: This month: 0 books read; YTD: 0 of 16 read.

                                                                Series fully completed: 0 of 3 planned

Monthly Special Challenge: I may not do something like this every month. Having checked several different websites, it seems like July is not a month that lends itself to any specific reading goal (it’s the National Month of several foods, though: National Baked Bean Month, Culinary Arts Month, Grilling Month, Horseradish Month, Hot Dog Month, Ice Cream Month, Blueberries Month, and Picnic Month!) So my mini-challenge to myself was to make July Series Month, to help me catch up on one of my year-long challenges (The “Complete the Series” Challenge).

Friends, I completely bombed this self-challenge. I brought two series on a three-week business trip (Seanan McGuire’s Velveteen series, and one of the two remaining books I need to read in Chinua Achebe’s Africa Trilogy) and read precisely none of them. (In fact, I discovered on the trip that I’d brought the wrong Achebe with me, so stopped reading….)

August’s monthly special challenge is/was in honor of PulpFest and FarmerCon, the annual overlapping conventions that celebrate the fiction of the Pulp magazine era and the work of author Philip Jose Farmer. Tune into my next post to see how I did with that!

Review of UPON A BURNING THRONE

TITLE: Upon A Burning Throne (The Burnt Empire Saga, Book One)

AUTHOR: Ashok K. Banker

669 pages, John Joseph Adams Books / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, ISBN 9781328916280 (Hardcover and e-book)

DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): From international sensation Ashok K. Banker, pioneer of the fantasy genre in India, comes the first book in a ground-breaking, epic fantasy series inspired by the ancient Indian classic, The Mahabharata.

In a world where demigods and demons walk among mortals, the Emperor of the vast Burnt Empire has died, leaving a turbulent realm without an emperor. Two young princes, Adri and Shvate, are in line to rule, but birthright does not guarantee inheritance: For any successor must sit upon the legendary Burning Throne and pass The Test of Fire. Imbued with dark sorceries, the throne is a crucible—one that incinerates the unworthy.
 
Adri and Shvate pass The Test and are declared heirs to the empire… but there is another with a claim to power, another who also survives: a girl from an outlying kingdom. When this girl, whose father is the powerful demonlord Jarsun, is denied her claim by the interim leaders, Jarsun declares war, vowing to tear the Burnt Empire apart—leaving the young princes Adri and Shvate to rule a shattered realm embroiled in rebellion and chaos....

MY RATING: 5 out of 5 stars

MY THOUGHTS: I mostly burned out on “epics” of all genres about a decade ago, give or take. Books topping out over 600 pages (many significantly over) just stopped appealing to me. The most “recent” book in George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series sits unread alongside a good number of Stephen King’s recent novels and countless others I bought with every good intention. Then in 2015 Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings, the first novel in his Dandelion Dynasty series, came along, and I realized that maybe the issue was less the size of the books and more the content – the idea that no matter how good the writing or beloved the author (and believe me, I love Stephen King’s work), I got tired of reading the same types of epics. This idea was cemented by my great enjoyment of Dylan Struzan’s A Bloody Business (a Prohibition tale writ as sweeping, operatic epic if ever there was one) and now of Ashok K. Banker’s Upon A Burning Throne.

I was prepared to like Upon A Burning Throne because of how much I enjoyed Banker’s “Legends of the Burnt Empire” short stories (novelettes?) in recent issues of Lightspeed Magazine. While you can read this novel without reading those stories, they do provide a lot of the world-building backbone. Past events hinted at in the novel are given full detail in the stories, which build with a growing sense of inevitability to the event that directly precedes the opening scene of the novel: the birth of the princes Adri and Shvate.

If there’s one thing the Liu and Banker books have in common, it’s that their structural (if not narrative) basis is in epic poetry of the distant past as opposed to the epic fantasy tropes of more recent times. There’s little, if any, trace of Tolkien here, but plenty of moments that put me in mind of The Iliad (which I have read) and what I’ve heard of the Mahabharata (which I haven’t read). Gods and demi-gods abound in Liu and Banker’s books, directly and indirectly affecting key moments in human history, but there’s nary an orc or dragon to be found. Which to me is just damned refreshing.

The book is sweeping in time-span (covering more than 20 years of character time), in location (cities and sub-nations across the Krushan Empire and their warring neighbor Reygistan) and in cast (by my count 14 major/important characters, almost as many secondary characters who momentarily get the spotlight, and a score of gods and goddesses). Epic is not an overstatement or a cliché here.

Like many ancient epic poems, Banker does not always reveal events in chronological order, sometimes breaking off mid-battle or mid-political-intrigue to introduce a new character and give their backstory only when they become important to the narrative. In lesser hands, this could make the story disjointed or make it feel disorganized. Banker handles it with a deft ease that belies how hard this kind of storytelling actually is, and the shifts in point-of-view actually heighten, rather than confuse or diminish, the reader’s interest. Every time the story took a seemingly disconnected jump to a new character or new place, I found myself eagerly asking how this was going to tie back to the main story. And it always did. It all does. There’s not a wasted scene. And while Banker may be laying the seeds of future volumes throughout this one, not a single seeming digression fails to loop back to the main narrative before the book’s final pages.

Okay, that’s not completely true. There is one character introduced in a major way in the prologue who I thought would be an important presence throughout this book but who disappears almost immediately. Even once I recognized the absence in scenes the character surely should have been present for, it didn’t bother me; something has to held back for Book Two (currently due in the spring of 2020) after all.

Although there are, as I mentioned, over a dozen main characters to contend with, the real focus is on the Princes Adri and Shvate – one blind, the other albino – and their struggles to prove they are capable of leading the vast Krushan Empire (note: not whether they are worthy – that issue is settled in the prologue – but whether they are capable; two very different concerns). If there is any similarity to the high/Euro-centric fantasy of Tolkien and Martin, it is in this. The Princes are viewed as “disabled” and thus, like Tolkien’s Hobbits, not seen as capable of accomplishing the task set before them. Other strive to convince them they should hand the task over to someone(s) more “normally-abled.” Like Frodo and Sam, Adri and Shvate have moments where their so-called disadvantages are what saves the day, moments where they fail, and moments where they are buoyed by loved ones or boon companions. Like Martin’s Stark siblings, the Princes are good men buffeted by the political machinations of less-good to downright-evil people. Also like Martin’s characters and like the protagonists of so many ancient epics, the Princes and their closest allies are good but not perfect. They make mistakes; are lustful and insecure and bold by turn; they are sometimes incisive and sometimes oblivious. In short, they are real people rather than archetypes. I can’t think of a single character, other than perhaps the “big bad” Jarsun, who fails to reveal complexity as the action progresses.

Up until now, I’ve only read some of Banker’s short stories (not all of them connected to this book) and enjoyed them all. Upon A Burning Throne has inspired me to seek out more of Banker’s novels. Yes, even if they’re more than 600 pages long!

Review of Carrie Vaughn's THE WILD DEAD

TITLE: The Wild Dead (Bannerless, Book 2)

AUTHOR: Carrie Vaughn

264 pages, John Joseph Adams Books, ISBN 9780544947313 (paperback, audio and e-book)

DESCRIPTION: A century after environmental and economic collapse, the people of the Coast Road have rebuilt their own sort of civilization, striving not to make the mistakes their ancestors did. They strictly ration and manage resources, including the ability to have children. Enid of Haven is an investigator, who with her new partner, Teeg, is called on to mediate a dispute over an old building in a far-flung settlement at the edge of Coast Road territory. The investigators’ decision seems straightforward – and then the body of a young woman turns up in the nearby marshland. Almost more shocking that that, she’s not from the Coast Road but from one of the outsider camps belonging to the nomads and wild folk who live outside the Coast Road communities. Now one of them is dead, and Enid wants to find out who killed her even as Teeg argues that the murder isn’t their problem. In a dystopian future of isolated communities, can our moral sense survive the worst hard times?

MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5

MY THOUGHTS:

(Disclaimer: although this review is very late in being posted, I did receive a print Advanced Reading Copy from John Joseph Adams Books in return for an honest review)

The second book in Carrie Vaughn’s post-apocalyptic murder mystery series builds on the promise of the first without being a static retread. Like the first book, this one is about as “cozy” of a mystery as you can get set in a world where electricity, and thus forensic crime labs, stopped working decades ago. But Vaughn builds more on the world itself, on how disparate communities are tied together by commerce and law more than mutual respect. On the one hand, everyone on the Coast Road knows they really can’t survive without working and trading with others. On the other hand, they still have fierce independent (and sometimes selfish) personal drives that typify 21st century Americans. In both Bannerless and The Wild Dead, Vaughn explores the rubbing up of rugged individualism against communal necessity.

This struggle, and several others, are represented most obviously by the community disagreement Enid and Teeg are sent to resolve: whether a remote community’s households should be required to pool resources to help one household repair and retain a pre-apocalypse structure. The community has worked together for the greater good before, but personality conflicts and varying interpretations of what is necessary for the whole versus selfish nostalgia threaten to overwhelm everyone. The point is made all the more clear when an outsider is discovered dead – is it worth Enid and Teeg’s time, is it worth the community’s resources, to investigate the death of a nameless girl from beyond the Coast Road, from a nomadic society the Coast Roaders don’t trust or see as equal/deserving? Enid, perhaps because of her past, feels it is worth the costs; her partner, not so much. The cozy mystery becomes part of a deeper personality/societal conflict which Vaughn explores through dialogue and nuanced description of the two communities Enid must navigate to find her answers.

The “Us vs. Them” mentality, the distrust of those who are different, is also prevalent. Is the Coast Road’s settle small community crops-and-barter system really any better at preserving civilization than the Wild Land’s nomadic scavenge-and-hunt structure? Vaughn doesn’t choose one over the other, and leaves her main protagonist undecided while other characters’ opinions are obvious.

No-one in the book ever actually utters the idiom “don’t look back, you’re not going that way,” but the conflict between nostalgia and moving forward is there from the battle over a failing structure to a 15-year-old community conflict that potentially affects current events. How long do we hold onto the past regardless of its usefulness? How long do we hold onto things we should have let go of for our own mental health? What does institutional memory look like when technology has failed and how do we learn from a past we can no longer access?

The murder mystery that brings all these interpersonal conflicts to light is a fair-play one. All the hints needed to put together what happened and why are laid out for the reader – some obviously, some so subtly you don’t realize what you read until much later. Vaughn’s ability to structure and spool out the details, including a fair number of red herrings, is so good I would gladly read any non-SF/F mystery she might choose to write in the future.

There’s so much more I’d love to comment on in the book: Teeg’s impatience, so trope-ily “millennial;” the sly winks at long running “amateur sleuth” series; Enid’s continued growth as an individual and as a member of a family unit; how easy it would be for a new reader to start with this book and still understand the characters and their world. But I’ve rambled on quite a bit already.

Vaughn really does a wonderful job of mashing the “apocalyptic SF” and “cozy mystery” genres, drawing on the strengths of each and occasionally conflating or subverting the tropes. If you know mystery fans who want to dip their toes into the SF genre, or vice versa, Vaughn’s Bannerless Saga books are the place to start them off.

JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS - Editor Interview

This week’s guest is editor John Joseph Adams, whose latest book is UNDER THE MOONS OF MARS, new short stories celebrating the 100th anniversary of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ classic hero John Carter of Mars.

John Joseph Adams

John Joseph Adams  is the bestselling editor of Wastelands, The Living Dead (a World Fantasy Award finalist), The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Brave New Worlds, The Way of the Wizard, and Lightspeed: Year One. Forthcoming anthologies include The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination (Tor Books) and Armored (Baen Books). In 2011, he was nominated for two Hugo Awards and two World Fantasy Awards. He has been called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble.com, and his books have been lauded as some of the best anthologies of all time. He is also the editor of Lightspeed Magazine, and is the co-host of The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxypodcast.

ANTHONY:   John, thanks for taking a few moments to chat with me about UNDER THE MOONS OF MARS. How did the project come about?

JOHN:  I’d heard that Disney was going to be adapting A Princess of Mars into a movie, and it sounded like–at LAST–the adaptation was finally going to happen. There had been a number of false-starts over the years, but it seemed like this one was finally going to happen, thanks in no small part to the success of (and SFX technological advancement provided by) Avatar. Being a fan of the original books, I was quite excited, and the idea of doing the “new adventures” of John Carter sprang to mind. It seemed like a good, marketable idea, and a book that would be a hell of a lot of fun, so I started putting together a proposal and recruiting authors for it. Once I started reaching out to people, the number of folks who were excited about it really reinforced my thought that it would be a great project, and luckily Simon & Schuster agreed and published the anthology.

ANTHONY:  The book features a fantastic line-up. Was there an open submission process or was it invitation only? Are there any authors you’d hoped would take part who weren’t able to?

JOHN:  The book was invitation-only; unfortunately, I had to keep it that way because I was under orders to keep the project secret basically until it was done being assembled; the publisher wanted to wait to announce it until we had a table of contents to show off. Also, I had recruited a pretty large number of authors for the book in the proposal stage, and I knew it would be unlikely that I’d have much extra room for anything beyond that. Plus, for a book like this one, which is a VERY specific topic, I knew if I did an open call for submissions, a lot of writers would end up with stories that they probably wouldn’t be able to sell anywhere else. Although the Barsoom stories are public domain, most short fiction venues are unlikely to run a story set in another author’s milieu.

Neil Gaiman and Michael Moorcock were both initially interested but ultimately couldn’t contribute due to their schedules, so that was disappointing. And there were a number of authors I would have loved to have on board who said no at the proposal stage for one reason or another. One contributing factor to this was that the anthology had to be put together on a pretty short timeline if we were going to have the book ready to publish to coincide with the release of the John Carter film.

Under The Moon of Mars

ANTHONY:  The preview for the book on Amazon mentions a number of great artists, like Charles Vess and Mike Kaluta, contributing story illustrations. How did you decide which artist to pair with which stories for the illustrations?

That was mostly decided by Lizzy Bromley & Tom Daly at Simon & Schuster and my agent, Joe Monti. I was consulted, and I could have taken a more active role in those decisions, but I’m no art director, and I don’t really have a lot of connections to many artists, so I was happy to have someone else take the lead. I was pleased to see Mike Cavallaro participate, as I’m a huge fan of the graphic novel he did with Jane Yolen called Foiled. Likewise John Picacio, who I’ve been a fan of for years, and, of course, it’s an honor and a privilege to have work by Charles Vess. And it was also really cool, of course, to be exposed to artists I wasn’t as familiar with previously.

You can actually view all of the illustrations on the anthology’s website, johnjosephadams.com/barsoom.

ANTHONY:  John Carter is easily Edgar Rice Burroughs’ second most popular creation after Tarzan, even though Burroughs didn’t write anywhere near as many books about Carter and in fact half of the Barsoom novels focus on other characters. What do you think is the enduring appeal of John Carter in particular and Barsoom in general?
JOHN:  On the most basic level, the Barsoom stories are just great adventure stories, and so they’re sort of inherently appealing. But they also cross all kinds of genre boundaries. They’re obstensibly science fiction, but they feel a lot like fantasy, and there are elements from other genres as well, certainly romance and western fiction to name a few.

I think that as kids, we all wanted to be able to travel to Mars, and wouldn’t it be great if we could and it turned out to be the fantastical place with strange and interesting aliens and beautiful princesses? And a lot of us still have such dreams–so I think that’s a large part of what makes it so appealing–and enduring.

ANTHONY:  2012 is also Tarzan’s 100th anniversary, and Burroughs’ Pellucidar series hits 100 in 2014. Are you involved at all in anniversary anthologies for those books?

JOHN:  I’m not–at least not at the moment! For Tarzan, it would be too late to do anything to celebrate the anniversary, obviously, but Pellucidar…who knows!

ANTHONY:  What other books do you have coming our way this year?

JOHN:  As we’ve discussed, Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom just came out.

Coming up in April, I have Armored, an anthology of stories about mecha and power armor, from Baen. It includes stories by Jack Campbell, Brandon Sanderson, Tanya Huff, Daniel H. Wilson, Alastair Reynolds, Carrie Vaughn, and others.

I’m also currently wrapping up work on two reprint anthologies. One is an anthology of epic/high fantasy fiction to be called Epic, which will be coming out from Tachyon Publications this fall. And due out this summer from Night Shade Books is Other Worlds Than These, an anthology of portal fantasies and parallel worlds stories. And, as usual, I’ve got a couple of other things in the works that I can’t officially talk about yet, but I hope to be able to announce soon.

Then, in February 2013, I’ll have The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, from Tor. That one features stories by Carrie Vaughn, Alan Dean Foster, Daniel H. Wilson, David Farland, Seanan McGuire, and Naomi Novik, among others, plus an original short novel by Diana Gabaldon.

ANTHONY:  And my usual closing question: What is your favorite book, and what would you say to someone who hasn’t read it to convince them that they should?

JOHN:  The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. When I read that book, it BLEW MY MIND. After reading it, my reading life became all about finding other books like that one. Up to that point, I’d read a number of sf novels that I liked a great deal, and still to this day remember fondly, but it wasn’t until The Stars My Destination that I realized the heights that science fiction was capable of attaining, and it wasn’t until then that I narrowed my reading focus almost exclusively to sf in my efforts to find more books that effected me in that same way.

There’s a paragraph in the book from the early part of chapter one that describes “common man” protagonist Gully Foyle’s state of mind. He’s been stuck, as the lone survivor, on a spaceship for 170 days, and watches as another ship approaches his, ignores his distress call, and leaves him to die:

He had reached a dead end. He had been content to drift from moment to moment of existence for thirty years like some heavily armored creature […] but now he was adrift in space for one hundred and seventy days, and the key to his awakening was in the lock. Presently it would turn and open the door to holocaust.

So that’s the key to Gully’s awakening. I think of The Stars My Destination as mine.

ANTHONY: Thanks again, John! Always a pleasure!

You can follow John Joseph Adams on Twitter as @JohnJosephAdams and you can see more about all of his books by visiting his website.