You've got three more days to help make SFF better ... and keep Crossed Genres going

Actually, writing isn't hard. It is mostly a goofily joyful experience.

Getting published, on the other hand, can be all kinds of miserable. Especially, if you happen to write speculative fiction that doesn't adhere to beloved (and worn threadbare) tropes, or if your writing style and protagonists are far from the default that the dominant culture assumes. Latino writer Daniel José Older has written eloquently about this and related topics on Salon and Buzzfeed.

As it happens, fairly early in his career, Older was published in the first iteration of Crossed Genres magazine, and subsequently the book side of CG published his acclaimed collection of short stories, Salsa Nocturna.

That first iteration of Crossed Genres magazine also published early work by Chinese-American SFF writer Ken Liu, whose work has gone on to be recognized with Nebula, Hugo and World Fantasy awards.

While Older and Liu may be some of the best-known of the magazine's alums, CG has a rare eye for talent, and many emerging writers have been published in the pages of its anthologies, its first magazine, and the newer version of Crossed Genres magazine (which is a Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America professional qualifying market), including Teresa Jusino, Priya Chand, Anthony Cardno, Shay Darrach, Athena Andreadis, A.J. Fitzwater, Kelly Jennings, Ibi Zoboi and many others.

All distinct and distinctive writers with one thing in common: they knock the default right out of speculative

by challenging expectations.

The thing is, it's not by chance that Older, Liu and the rest of the CG cohort have been published by the small, Boston-based press. Publishers Kay Holt and Bart Leib are committed to running a magazine and press that reflects the true breadth and range of today's speculative fiction. Because of Holt's and Leib's outreach to QUILTBAG, trans*, writers of color, international and non-Anglophone writers, CG has been labelled by some genre purists as "destroying SFF."

That alone is enough to endear them to me for the next several hundred years. But, the truth is, I'm already forever indebted to them. The first speculative fiction story I sold, Flying with the Dead, was to CG (version 1). Other stories appeared in their anthologies Fat Girl in a Strange Land, Menial: Skilled Labor in Science Fiction, and the upcoming Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, which will launch in May. They also published my novel, INK — half magical realism, half immigration-based political dystopia — written by an older Latina writer whose publication credits at the time were solely in journalism.... ¡Híjole! It still boggles the mind that they took the chance.

So, anyway...

Crossed Genres has three days to go on a Kickstarter campaign that will enable them to continue publishing the pro-rate magazine for another year and become self-sufficient. I don't tend to enjoin my friends and readers to support kickstarters, but I believe speculative fiction needs magazines and presses exactly like CG — you know, the ones that see the past, present and future with you and me in it.

I plan to support Crossed Genres and I really hope you will too. (Need that kickstarter link again? Here you go.)

The trajectory of women and stars: A review of The Other Half of the Sky

As women age, we get fiercer.

This is true of your clear-eyed, soft-bodied grandmother as it is of the woman of indeterminate age in front of you in the complaint line — or picket line — loudly expressing her indignation.

We wear our experiences on our faces and accumulate our knowing in our bones.

We understand this even as the societal image-making machinery sells us images of young women who are little more than enfleshed desire, walking cliche and narrative accessory. We understand this even as that same machine feeds us images of older women with faces ironed out by cosmetic surgery and bowed by their transition from actor to cameo.

Athena Andreadis is a fierce woman.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the introduction to her science fiction anthology, The Other Half of the Sky (Candlemark & Gleam, April 2013). I imagine that for the reader who picks up the book without knowing in advance that Andreadis is a formidable intellect who juggles the languages of science and myth with equal zeal and dexterity, the introduction may come as a bit of a shock.

The introduction to the anthology is a ripping away of the blinkers donned by a genre that has been billed as having a vision as expansive as the universe. Expansive for whom, Andreadis asks, and in which universe? Not us, not ours — unless we are men, and white, and satisfied with the proscribed roles and trajectories assigned to women in the image-making machines of the genre.

The introduction is partisan.

In case you’ve decided to read this as a negative, let me clarify. I’m tempted to see Andreadis as a kind of Anna Magnani in Rome Open City or Maribel Verdú in Pan’s Labyrinth — someone drawn into resistance by the injustice done to a city, a people, a genre she loves — but such an analogy would ignore that Andreadis isn’t drawn into resistance, she leads it. She fights those who repress, and disdains those who collude.

But where you really see Andreadis’ mettle isn’t in the fierce introduction but in the even fiercer choice of collecting (or cajoling) short stories in open rebellion with the image-making machinery of Sci Fi. Some of these stories succeed better than others, but all of them have at their heart the radical notion that we’ll define our own roles and map our own trajectories among the stars.

The anthology opens with the story Finders by Melissa Scott. It is an interesting choice. The story revolves around a salvage crew, a leader beset by a debilitating condition at the point of transitioning from chronic to terminal, and a salvage score that is both ambush and salvation. It is an easy story to read — just the right length and tone — and we’re familiar enough with interstellar salvage crews from movies like Alien that we get both the emotional and societal shorthand and Scott’s new view. I suspect the story was chosen so the reader could revel in the quiet after the introduction’s storm. It’s an editorial gambit that might work better for others than for me, but I almost wish the anthology had opened with the thornier read, Exit, Interrupted by C.W. Johnson, which uses as a device doors — exits and entries — that need to be stolen to be opened against authority.

Aliette de Bodard’s The Waiting Stars and Ken Liu’s The Shape of Thought are two of my favorite stories in the anthology, and there’s no surprise in that. They are both tremendously accomplished writers, and they each explore — with nuance, subtlety and generosity — ideas of otherness, of interactions ruled by disparities of power and wildly divergent cultural worldviews. This is rich stuff, and I’m as addicted to it as I am to coffee and chocolate.

De Bodard’s story echoes with the history of First Nations’ children taken away from their families and forced to eschew their language, customs and cultural patrimony for a foreign understanding of salvation — though, in this case, not a religious salvation. Her sentient ships, repositories of memory and living connection to the suppressed community, are deftly drawn characters, and the reawakening is a beautifully drawn triumph. It is proof of de Bodard’s generosity as a writer that she allows readers invested in the primacy of romantic love a bittersweet moment even as she tweaks it.

Liu’s story is informed by both colonial history and anthropology. I have to admit I was tripped up a bit by his choice of non-gendered pronoun (“ze” conjures the sound of bad French accents performed by earnest community theater performers for me), but almost as soon as I noted this I was carried beyond it by the strength of his writing. The story of the child who breaches a walled enclave between the known community and the other isn’t unfamiliar, but Liu is a master at imbuing his stories with so many gorgeous small moments — irresistible little beauties really — that I found myself forgiving him the predictability of outcome.

It doesn’t much matter to me whether I know where the storyline is taking me if I like the way it’s taking me there. Vandana Singh’s Sailing the Antarsa is a perfect example. Singh has the most consciously gorgeous of all the writing styles foregrounded by the anthology, so much so that her language almost becomes a character and becomes driver in this story of isolated space travel. All of the stories Andreadis and her partner Kay Holt edited for anthology are longer than the norm for the anthologies I’ve read, but Singh’s is one of the ones I really wish they had cut a bit. Not even the exhilarating language could keep me from being exhausted — and a little glad — by the time it came to a close.

The other story that could have used some trimming was Christine Lucas’ Ouroboros. Again, a fine story — this one touching upon othering utilitarianism and the power of myth and ancestral memory — but there are long stretches that would have lost neither their music nor their narrative impetus had they been shorter.

I’m not going to write about every other story because, well, I’m lazy and it’s my blog.;) All of the stories are quite competent and the vast majority of them are enjoyable. There are a few that I wouldn't choose to reread. Cat Rambo’s Dagger and Mask hopped heads at last moment, and what was there — revelation and ship captain’s voice, both — felt flat and one-dimensional to me. Martha Wells’ Mimesis seemed an incident rather than a story, and I could never warm to Terry Boren’s unusual diction in This Alakie and the Death of Dima.

Liking and not liking are, of course, a function as much of how we read as what we read. Joan Slonczewski’s Landfall was subject to that distinction. Why? Well, I don’t know if Slonczewski is Latina, but the story has a Latina protagonist, and that made me read it hypercritically. It is one of the prices to be paid for being editor of a Latino-owned, Spanish-language newspaper — I’m always on the lookout for portrayals of Latin@s that feel real and lived. Kudos to her for including a variety of Latin@s in the story and for giving them individual quirks. Did they remind me of me or my family or my coworkers or friends? Nope. Did their Spanish have the rhythm and cadence of Cuban and Puerto Rican Spanish? Nope.

Having said that, kudos are owed because the Spanish in Slonczewski’s story is truly Spanish. There is one incredibly awkward sentence that I think is intentionally phrased that way, but over all, a win. On the other hand, the Spanish wasn’t always used organically and at certain moments the choice seemed more linguistic tourism than character driven. Also — more pointed at the editors than to the writer — I always find it odd when Spanish words are italicized when they occur in the speech or thinking of a Latin@ character. The only reason to italicize is because it is a foreign word — but to the character that Spanish word isn’t foreign. And if you do italicize a Latino character’s speech, I feel it only fair you use the Spanish punctuation, too. So ¡candela!

The anthology closes with the story Cathedral by Jack McDevitt which, if I’m remembering correctly, was panned in an early review of the anthology. This was not my favorite story — Matt’s love for Laura is foregrounded at odd moments and too frequently —but it is a solid and well-crafted story that I hung in with from beginning to end. It is also a brilliant editorial choice to close the anthology with it. The story concerns itself with the last mission of a NASA soon to be defunded and shuttered. The opportunity presents itself for the characters to make the space program relevant again. It only requires they deliberately break the rules.

And, of course, that is what the Other Half of the Sky does.

A final note that harks back to the beginning. I was disappointed to note that, for all its rule breaking, the Other Half of the Sky had precious few older women protagonists (Alexander Jablokov’s Bad Day at Boscobel is the only one that comes to mind). Since I know both Andreadis and Holt are conscious of, and vocal about, the ageism evidenced in most SFF, I have to believe it is a lack attributable to writers rather than editors of this anthology.

So to you, younger writers of SFF, I say: as rare and proscribed as the portrayals of older women are in mainstream movies, Hollywood's more proactive about showing us than you are. Got it? Pretty terrible.

You've been warned — the older we get, the fiercer we get about this (and everything we care about).

So do better, okay?

Nothing like home: A review of Oz Reimagined

When I received the anthology Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond (John Joseph Adams and David Cohen; 47North; Feb. 2013) as a perk from Klout, I was of two minds. One was delighted to be getting a book of speculative short fiction early in its publication cycle, before it had been reviewed and discussed to death. The other was leary of the thread that connected all of the stories together.

So let me be upfront about this: I have no love for Oz.

The only affection I can conjure for this particularly American series has to do with my mother and her delight in the movie version.

We didn’t go to the movies much when I was growing up in Guatemala. I remember seeing a few of Rafael Lanuza’s Lucha Libre films with Superzan (Guatemala’s best known masked wrestler) at a movie theater in Zone 11 with my grandmother. I remember seeing a very soapy period drama from either Spain or South America, starring Fernando Allende, with my classmates in Zone 1. And I remember seeing a handful of first-run movies (often a year or so after they opened in the U.S.) and old Hollywood “classics” at a Zone 10 movie theater with my family.

My mother (who one of Mexico’s biggest movie stars had tried to convince to join the company of Churubusco film actors when she was still in high school) absolutely LOVED movies, and my first name should give you the clue that her favorites were golden-age, big studio Hollywood productions.

So I saw The Wizard of Oz for the first time in a movie theater, subtitled in Spanish, with my mother whispering in my ear about how magical the transition from black-and-white to color had been for her when she first saw it. I can’t remember if she imparted that information to me in English or in Spanish, but I do recall her eyes sparkling and her voice getting pitchy with the excitement of sharing something she loved.

You understand, then, that I really wanted to like it.

But I didn’t.

Years later, after I had moved to the U.S. and after hearing the unadulterated fondness in my friends‘ voices as they spoke of it, I tried watching the movie again. And then again when my daughter was little.

A la tercera, la vencida, as we say in Spanish. Which means not that the third time is a charm but that it seals the failure. By the time my daughter was given copies of several Oz books for her birthday by some grown-up aficionado of the series, I wasn’t tempted to crack them open to see if I’d prefer the literary version.

Adams and Cohen asked the writers of Oz Reimagined to base their stories on the literary Oz, so book-only characters such as patchwork girl Scraps and pumpkin-headed Jack appear in a number of these stories, as do several Ozmas. But, of course, the four characters central to the movie — Dorothy, the Tin Man, Scarecrow and Lion — are the most frequently recurring protagonists in the stories of the anthology.

And therein resides one of the editors’ challenges. I don’t think Adams and Cohen were entirely successful in meeting it with their selection of stories for the anthology, despite the undeniable skill of everyone involved. I was exhausted by the number of reiterations of Dorothy (Dot, Theodora, etc.) and only occasionally surprised by a new main character.

Beyond shared protagonists, there is a sameness of tone in many of these stories and, despite the variation in specific narrative, a sameness in writers’ the approach to this preexisting universe. Oz is a quintessentially American mythos, and most of the stories in Oz Reimagined present an unrelentingly Anglo set of motivations and narrative choices (more about this later). The notable exception is Ken Liu’s “The Veiled Shanghai,” and accordingly, it is one of the three stories I think stand beyond the concept of the anthology.

Liu places Dorothy and her cohorts in 1919 Shanghai and casts their adventures as a stream of actions and events in a fictionalized moment of the historical May Fourth Movement. This gives it a narrative richness that none of the other stories attains. Moreover, Liu gives us a bit of complexity in his iterations of Dorothy, the Tin Man, Scarecrow and the Wizard — all of them have backstories and rationales that resonate far beyond the simplistic original. There is satisfaction to be had in the steampunkish elements of the unveiled Shanghai, and in the intelligence of the points of overlap between the two Shanghais. Liu’s isn’t the only story in the anthology that plays with the overlap of Oz and mundane world. Orson Scott Card’s “Off to see the Emperor” is another, but unlike Card, Liu honors the doubled vision instead of having his character grow up and out of magic. This is the first Liu story I’ve read, and if it is representative of his work, I can well understand why his stories are on all the award ballots.

Another story that holds up well under scrutiny is the last one in the anthology, “The Cobbler of Oz” by Jonathan Maberry. It is a story set fully in the fantastical Oz side of the universe though, refreshingly, without any of the ubiquitous main characters. The charm of Maberry’s story comes from his central protagonist, a young winged monkey girl who cannot fly. Maberry breaks no ground with this story, but gives us three immensely appealing characters (the cobbler, the monkey girl and the last silver dragon) with enough hints of backstory for each to mitigate the familiarity of the quest narrative.

“City So Bright” by Dale Bailey also imagines the lives of those at the margins of the original Oz. His main character is a munchkin worker charged with cleaning and polishing the high walls of Emerald City. Bailey doesn’t overlap Oz and mundane world as Liu does, but stratifies Oz in terribly mundane-world ways (as does Seanan McGuire in her “Emeralds to Emeralds, Dust to Dust”). So the working folk of Oz live under the showcase city, leading hardscrabble lives in service to the city and its faceless power brokers. It is Occupy Oz (though without the numbers). Bailey’s greatest success, to my mind, is that his characters would be at home in a Clifford Odets play (or any of the pieces that came from America’s brief literary flirtation with poetry-infused "everyman" social realism) even while they are munchkins and winkies and maimed winged monkeys.

The anthology is filled with big names of speculative fiction: Card, McGuire, Tad Williams, Theodora Goss, Jane Yolen and Rachel Swirsky, among others. Many of them are writers whose work I admire and I was willing to believe their considerable skills were enough to break through the antipathy I have for the Oz universe.

Unfortunately it proved not to be entirely true.

I love Yolen’s skill in building character, but the running away to join the circus narrative of “Blown Away” is almost as narrowly American as Oz itself. Yolen’s choice in storytelling voice made it impossible for me to connect with the story. Worse, her depiction of the proscribed lives of the women in her narrative is so slight that it makes the ultimate choice to run away terribly unconvincing. It isn't that easy, I kept thinking. Goss’s story “The Lost Girls of Oz” also suffered from an unconvincing change of heart in its main character, and from a weightless depiction of the decision to take up arms.

I’m fond of Williams “Otherland” setting, but his “The Boy Detective of Oz” in the anthology felt like a piece on its way to another. You know, the patch of yellow brick interstate you don't remember when you've actually arrived at your destination. Swirsky’s “Beyond the Naked Eye” had an amusing reality show framing device, but the unfolding and resolution was so predictable I came away feeling cheated. McGuire’s story is a lively urban fantasy, but its most thought provoking component turns out to be its city planning.

One of the writers, Robin Wasserman in her “One Flew Over the Rainbow,” wasn’t satisfied with mining just one movie-and-book legend, and so placed the familiar Oz gang in Nurse Ratched and Ken Kesey territory. The characterization was lovely in this story, and in the end, affecting. But the deftness of its manipulation annoys, and you can feel the writer smirking about how smartly done it all is.

As a newspaper editor, I long ago devised a way to rank and prioritize the stories in each edition we put together. As I understand it from fiction editor friends, there is a quite specific art to the ranking and prioritizing of stories in an anthology. I must be an anthology editor’s bane because I tend to read the stories of writers I like first, regardless of where they’ve been placed in the anthology. But in this case I did not. I read the stories in the order the editors planned, and I have to say, I think Adams and Cohen made some odd choices.

The opening story, “The Great Zeppelin Heist of Oz” by Rae Carson and C.C. Finlay, is neither the strongest nor written by the most famous (either of which would have been my newspaper editor's gambit). Two of the best pieces are hidden in the middle of the book, and I must confess I almost didn't make it that far. The only placement decision I can agree with wholeheartedly is closing with Maberry’s story. It is an accomplished and sweet piece, and I came away feeling much kinder toward the anthology than I would have, say, if they had closed it with Card's or Wasserman's piece.

More distressing than the placement however is the lack of diversity. I don’t know all of the writers included so I don’t know if they are mostly Anglo, but I’d be willing to bet so. Because there are no non-Anglo characters in evidence (at least none that I can remember as I write this blog post) except for Liu’s. None of the other stories engage with race or ethnicity in any way (and judging by the movie, if not by the books, there are some obvious race and ethnicity issues that need addressing in Baum’s universe).

Since it’s likely, judging from the level of contributors, that this was an invitation-only anthology, I wonder if the lack of diversity reflects the lack of appeal of the source material to writers of color, or if it indicates an editorial lack of imagination.

They might have taken some editorial flak, but inviting some non-U.S. SFF writers to contribute would have provided a fascinating counterpoint to the original Oz’s Monroe Doctrine-ish worldview, and would have better engaged readers like me — with my mixed bag of heritages and experiences. But that's a lot to expect. Still, at the very least, the editors should have secured the work of some U.S.-born writers of color, who — provided the Oz material was palatable or redeemable to them — would have added a very distinct set of voices and sensibilities to this anthology. It is Liu’s talent that makes his piece stand head and shoulders above the rest in this book, but it is also the fact that it is so absolutely distinct from the others.

Really, try this: Put Goss’s name on Yolen’s story, and vice versa. Or, swap the names on Card’s story and Simon Green’s “Dorothy Dreams.” The changes are credible because the worldviews each set of stories and/or writers present are so fundamentally similar. But try doing that with Liu’s story and any other story in the anthology ....

Ultimately, what this anthology did best for me was make me realize just how tired I am of American books that don’t care if they speak to, or about, me and mine. Just to be clear: the realization isn’t about the Oz book released way back in 1900, but about the one released this month.