UK-based photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten creates tableaus of miniature villages juxtaposed with teenage girls. Check out the full series, which is at once magical and at times disturbing.

Read Worm Within by Cat Rambo at Clarkesworld Magazine.

The LED bug kicks feebly, trying to push itself away from the wall. Its wings are rounds of mica, and the hole in its carapace where someone has tacked it to the graying boards reveals cogs and gears, almost microscopic in their dimension. The light from its underside is the cobalt of distress.

It flutters there, sputtering out blue luminescence, caught between earth and air, between creature life and robot existence. Does it believe itself insect or mechanism? How can it be both at once?

I always get excited when I see Cat Rambo’s name in a table of contents because I know I’m in for a good ride. Not only does “Worm Within” live up to that expectation, it is seriously disturbing. Go read it and see if I’m right.

We’re so used to American style hand and rod video puppetry, like the Muppets, that it’s easy to forget that there are whole other traditions out there. Check this out and brace yourself for awesome.

Kevin Kao pointed this out. He’s got a nice breakdown on his blog about what must have gone into making a video like this.

Just in case I didn’t say this clearly enough before: This is a wonderful production and if you are in NYC you must go see it.

Sinking Ship Productions delivers ingenious new stage adaptations of three science fiction tales, using elements of story theatre, puppetry, and video. Director Jon Levin takes 3 stories and turns them into wonderfully theatrical fare:
“How The World Was Saved”, adapted from the story by Stanislaw Lem
“On the Nature of Time”, based on the story by Bill Pronzini & Barry N. Malzberg
“There Will Come Soft Rains”, based on the short story by Ray Bradbury

This production received excellent reviews and sold out in its original run. The performance has been extended through September, so don’t delay in ordering tickets!

WHERE: THE BARROW STREET THEATRE
27 Barrow St.
New York, NY 10014
http://www.barrowstreettheatre.com/index.asp
WHEN: Thu 9/4 @ 7pm, Sat 9/6 @ 2pm & 7pm, Sun 9/7 @ 2pm, Wed 9/10 @ 8pm
TICKETS: $18

I was having a conversation with someone about why there aren’t more SF plays. And lo! One appears. there will come soft rains contains adaptations of three short stories by Ray Bradbury, Stanislaw Lem, Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg. Using puppetry, minimal staging, dance and actors this created some of the most compelling theater I’ve seen in a long time.

What’s really exciting to me about the show is that the staging itself pushes the boundaries the way that the best SF does. I’ve often said that the thing that attracts me to both puppetry and speculative fiction is that they are both places where anything is possible. There Will Come Soft Rains took full advantage of that juxtaposition.

There Will Come Soft Rains is the sort of thing I want to see on the nominations list for Dramatic Short Form, but never do.

Seriously. Go see it. There’s only one show left. Saturday at 7:30.

Fantasy Magazine has Sean Markey’s Sorrowbird up today. I think you might enjoy it.

I. How to Build a Mourning Dove

First, take your husband’s awkward, enthusiastic letters from the night-stand drawer, the ones he wrote on his way from England to India. Take those smooth papers and wad them up tight. Keep your sorrow out of your actions; let the sadness of the letters speak. Use your anger and frustration to ball up the papers, and marvel at the unfairness of your life. Use the hurt of your loss to crumple each piece into one tight, circular shape. These papers represent the body of the bird you will make.

I’ve had a copy of Cherie Priest’s Four and Twenty Blackbirds sitting on my shelf for over a year now. The stack of “please read me” is very tall and I look at it with longing, but the thought of adding a book to all the other things I’m lugging around the city is not appealing.

Then Tor solved my problem by releasing it as a free ebook. I downloaded that sucker faster than you can say download and have to wonder why I waited so long to read it. Granted, my family is from Chattanooga, so there’s an immediate connection there, but more importantly, the story and characters are compelling.

How compelling you might ask? When Eden was — no spoilers, suffice to say she was in deep, I went an extra stop on the train and then walked back READING. You think walking while reading a book makes you look nerdy? Walking while reading a palm pilot… now that’s dedication.

If you haven’t read it, and the idea of Southern Gothic horror sounds appealing, let me recommend Four and Twenty Blackbirds. I’ve got a copy of the next book on order. I just wish I could get it as an ebook.

I was given an ARC of Scott Mebus’s Gods of Manhattan The basic premise is that a parallel, magic, Manahatta exists throughout Manhattan. It is inhabited by the Gods of Commerce, The Best China, Guilt, Opposite Side of the Street Parking, and the like. These gods used to be mortals, but after their death if they lived on in memory, they could become elevated to godhood. People like Peter Stuyvesant and Babe Ruth run through these pages along with two totally believable kids.

I started jotting down favorite parts but then got caught up in the story and forgot to keep doing it. So here are two from close to the beginning.

He knew she couldn’t see what he was seeing. Because he was going crazy and that’s not really a team sport.

When Bridget picks up her only Barbie (she doesn’t normally pay with “such girlie things” and had given it a makeover) we get this fabulous bit.

This was Malibu Death Barbie. A fashion-conscious dealer of justice. The last thing her enemies saw before their horrible dismemberment was a flash of pink lipstick and a really big knife.

If you’ve got a teen reader in your life, look for Gods of Manhattan when it comes out. History, adventure and magic! What more can you ask for?

One of the things Mom had wanted to do while she and Dad were here was see some theater. So, her birthday present to me was to take us all out to see Macbeth, starring Patrick Stewart. When we realized that we had two tickets available, Rob and I invited Rick Bowes and Emily DeCola to accompany us.

All of us agreed that this was the best production of Macbeth we’d ever seen. Start with a good strong cast. Then, my god, give them a production design that is about as close to perfect as anything I’ve seen. Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s sharpest plays and this dives right in and cuts.

It’s hard to explain why it’s so good, without spoiling some surprises for people who are planning on seeing this production. So — don’t click on the cut if you don’t want to know. Before I get all private on you…

Thank you Mom and Dad!!!

Continue reading The Scottish Play

I gave my nephew the first book in the Strongbow Saga and the moment he finished it, he made his dad go to the bookstore to get book two. He’s been whining, wondering when book three would come out.

Here’s the answer.

They just posted the works whose eligibility for next year’s Nebulas expires at the end of January. I noticed that Cat Rambo’s story, “Foam on Water” published in Strange Horizons, has seven recommendations. I loved this and recommended it a while ago.

The story only lacks three recommendations to be on next year’s preliminary ballot.

May I recommend, especially if you are a SFWA member, that you read it?

This takes the Little Mermaid and makes it look like Hans Christian Andersen was writing stories made of cotton candy.

In what may be the coolest tool for someone trying to get a quick handle on accents, the Speech Accent Archive¹ has scores of non-English speakers reading the same paragraph in English.

Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.

There are languages that I’ve never heard of. Mortlockese? Xasonga? Teochew?

Very cool stuff.

Edited to add: Alex Wilson pointed me to a similar project which has both English dialects and accents of other language speakers. One of the strangest things, for me, about the sample text they use is that my maiden name shows up in the middle of it.

The goose’s owner, Mary Harrison, kept calling, “Comma, Comma,” which Sarah thought was an odd choice for a name.

Astonishing the number of different ways one can say Mary Harrison. I shudder to think what would happen if they tried Kowal.

1. Spotted by Jenn Nixon [↩]

Okay… maybe there are better ways than Chaucer’d Dr. Seuss to start out the New Year, but not by much.

HorrorScope did a review of Horror in 2007

To see out the death of 2007, HorrorScope assembled a team of experts within the field of horror and dark fantasy to compile an experts’ choice recommended reading list.

If you click through and scroll down to “International authors to watch in 2008,” somehow, my name wound up on the list. This is funny because I don’t think of myself as a horror writer. I know I write it sometimes, but I have a different picture in my head of myself. One with less blood and pain.

Still, I’m awfully flattered and pleased.

All the good SFWA boys and girls seem to have dutifully posted about the pending close of the Nebula preliminary ballot on December 31. On the off-chance that you are a SFWA active member and haven’t recommended any fiction yet, I would like to recommend a simple strategy.

My opinion on the Nebulas is that one of the primary benefits comes from the ballot itself. Simply put, any story that makes it on the ballot will automatically get a much wider readership as people review stories for voting. So, when I’m recommending stories, I’m choosing stories that I think people ought to read, whether or not I think the story is ultimately likely to win the award.

Getting on the ballot is a boost to writer because it does raise their profile, and thus, people are more likely to notice their other work later. It might not be a conscious thing, but you see someone on the Nebula ballot and next time, by golly, you’ll see their name and think, “I’ve heard of her.”

So here are writers who I want to support and think that you should read their stories.

Novelettes
Andrea Kail: The Sun God at Dawn, Rising from a Lotus Blossom (Writers of the Future Volume 23) This is a brilliantly done epistolary tale told in a series of letters from Tutankahmen to Abraham Lincoln. Trust me, it makes perfect, chilling sense when you read it. Beautifully and heart-breakingly done.
It also has eight recommendations and its eligibility ends in March. Go! Recommend it! Do you really want to see it not make the ballot because you didn’t take the twenty minutes it will take to read this gorgeous story? I didn’t think so.

Ted Kosmatka: The Prophet of Flores (Asimov’s, Sep07) Holy cow! This is a freaky blend of SF and alternate history. The deep-story to this one? Intelligent design is real. The earth is only 5800 years old and carbon-dating proves it. And then someone finds a fossil that turns everything upside down. Seven recommendations thus far, but this one has eligibility until September, so I’m not quite as frantic about it making the ballot. But, you’ll be missing out if you don’t read it.

Livia Llewellyn: The Four Hundred Thousand I don’t know how to describe this one without giving away the creepy turns this chilling SF story takes. To grossly over-simplify it, this is about the right to choose. But, look, there’s a link so you can go read it. And do.

Jennifer Pelland: Mercytanks The person who pointed this one out to me said that it was the first time they’d really seen far-future done well. And how.

Short Stories:
Richard Bowes has two I liked: A Tale for the Short Days (Coyote Road, Trickster Tale) and King of the Big Night Hours(Subterranean, Sep07). The thing that he does, particularly with the King of the Big Night Hours, is tell a story that seems so absolutely, totally grounded in reality that it makes you wonder why you haven’t noticed any magic happening in your life. I mean, these seem like they are things that actually happened.

Vylar Kaftan: Kill Me Extremely evocative SF. The story is deceptively simple. A professional masochist has a device which records her thoughts so that she can be killed and brought back. But there’s a price; there’s always a price.

Andrea Kail: Soft Like a Rabbit I read this the first time as I was typesetting Fantasy. It stopped me cold. I forgot what I was supposed to be doing and just read the story. When I finished I couldn’t understand why I’d never read anything of Andrea Kail’s before. She’s a power-house and tells economical and wrenching stories. Have tissues standing by when you read this.

Nancy Kress: End Game I listened to this one at Escape Pod. Again, SF. Have you ever wished you could just concentrate on one thing at a time? Listen to this and rethink your wish.

David D. Levine: Titanium Mike Saves the Day This is probably the first light-hearted one I’ve mentioned. People always need tall tales; why should outerspace be any different? A fine example of yarn-spinning.

Lisa Mantchev: Six Scents Six tales in one. I could sum this up as tales of famous fictional women and their favorite perfumes, but really, it would not do justice to the brutally clever writing here. For example: “Men find it hard to fall in love with a dead girl. They tell her it’s a turn-off that they take her hand at the movies and a finger lands in the popcorn.”

Joy Marchard: Pallas at Noon lives in the uncanny place between things that could actually happen and the magic that lies just on the other side of that. I don’t even know how to describe this story, but definitely find a copy of Interfictions and read this. It will make you weep and feel hope and despair all at the same time.

Holly Phillips: The Oracle Spoke is quite possibly my favorite story this year. It’s the one that I desperately wish I had written. Please read it.

Cat Rambo: Foam on the Water You think Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid has a chilling ending? Ha! He could have taken lessons from Cat Rambo’s story.

I’m not doing mini-reviews of the novels, because I know you won’t have time to read any between now and then. But here are some that I think you should read after the first of the year.

Chris Barzak, One for Sorrow; Tobias Buckell, Ragamuffin; Jay Lake, Mainspring; Ekaterina Sedia, The Secret History of Moscow.

And finally, I will finish with a totally shameless self-pimp.

Look! For Solo Cello, op. 12 has six whole Nebula recommendations. This is makes me squee with girlish pleasure.

All right folks, there’s still reading to do. Go forth recommend stories! (And I hereby open this up for shameless promotion. Got a story you want read? Link away!)

I decided to replace the “I am reading” section of my sidebar with “Recommended Reading.” Why? Well, these days, I’m reading really slowly because I almost never have time to sit down with a book. Plus, since it’s gift-giving season, I figured that I’d point out books that I’ve enjoyed. So, it’ll randomly show books that I think are worth reading.

Meanwhile, if you are looking for books for a reader in your life, may I recommend these as my top picks?

For the early reader in your life

• AlphaOops: The Day Z Went First, by New-York Times Best-Selling author, Alethea Kontis. In my brother’s paraphrased words, “That was my favorite book to read to my daughter. Wow!”

For the YA reader

• Strongbow by Judson Roberts. I passed this to my nephew after I finished reading it. His first question upon finishing it? “When does the next book come out?”

For the YA reader suffering through a horse fixation

• Born To Trot one was one of my favorites growing up.
  Good heavens. If you know a kid who likes horses, this is the right book.

Want an anthology of short fantastic fiction?

• Try Prime Codex Yeah, I’m in it, but I wouldn’t recommend it if I didn’t think that the rest of the stories are really, really good.

How about a novel?

• The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch would be my pick. (I might change my mind when I finish The Secret Life of Moscow.)

Now… I’ve recommended some books for you. I want some books to add to my Christmas wishlist. Your suggestions, please?