The Sleeper Awakens

February 6, 2024 at 9:06 am

Exciting news for all the Wild Cards fans out there. Today is the publication day for the newest Wild Cards hardcover from Bantam, the thirty-third volume in the overall series… but no, you do not need to have read the first thirty-two to enjoy this book.

SLEEPER STRADDLE is the title. And yes, as our long-time readers will no doubt guess, this one features a character who has been around since the first Wild Cards Day (September 15, 1946 — the day Howard Waldrop was born): the Sleeper, created by the late great Roger Zelazny.

In poker, a sleeper straddle is a blind raise, made from a position other than the player “under the gun.” Sleepers are often considered illegal out-of-turn play and are commonly disallowed. In Wild Cards, the Sleeper is Croyd Crenson, who was a high school freshman on his way home from school when the virus was released over Manhattan. From that day on, Croyd has been continuously reinfected by the virus whenever he sleeps, his body reshaping itself into a myriad of new shapes and forms. Each time he wakes, he is changed. Sometimes he wakes as an ace, with astonishing new superpowers, different every time. Other times he wakes as a joker, malformed and hideous. He lives in terror of the day he draws the black queen, and does not wake at all. Croyd can sleep for days, weeks, even months, but when awake he does all he can to keep sleep at bay. Unable to hold a normal job or have a normal relationship, he lives on the margins of society; he has been a bodyguard, a thief, a mercenary, a con man, a hero for hire… whatever it takes to survive. Everyone knows Croyd, and no one really knows Croyd.

You never know what you are going to get when the Sleeper wakes. He is the ultimate wild card… and our most iconic character. It is long past time he had a book of his own.

The lineup this time around:

“Days Go By,” by Carrie Vaughn,
“The Hit Parade,” by Cherie Priest ,
“Yin-Yang Split,” from William F. Wu,
“Semiotics of the Strong Man,” by Walter Jon Williams,
“Party Like It’s 1999,” from Stephen Leigh,
“The Bloody Eagle,” by Mary Anne Mohanraj,
“The Boy Who Would Be Croyd,” from Max Gladstone.

The stories will be tied together by “Swimmer, Flier, Felon, Spy” from Christopher Rowe, featuring his enigmatic investigator Tesla. Other featured characters will include old favorites like Golden Boy, Oddity, Lazy Dragon, and Ramshead, along with some great new aces and a colorful assortment of jokers and jacks.

Ye editor is hardly objective, of course, but I have to confess, I have always loved Croyd, and it was great to see him in action again, in tales that spanned the decades, from the Fifties to the present day. Those of you who are already Sleeper fans will be delighted, I think, and as for all the readers out there who have yet to meet Mr. Crenson… you have a treat in store.

Roger would have loved this book, I like to think. I hope you will as well.

Tags: bantam spectra, editing, wild cards, writing

Hugo Nominations Open

April 2, 2023 at 8:47 am

This year’s World Science Fiction Convention (the 81st) is happening in Chengdu, China, from October 18-22.

That’s later than usual. Nominations for the Hugo Awards opened later as well, but they DID open on March 1. They will close April 30, so you have a month and change left to nominate your favorite books, stories, fanzines, writers, TV shows, and movies from last year. That is, assuming you hold a membership in the Chengdu worldcon. Both attending and supporting members are eligible to nominate, so you don’t actually need to be planning on a trip to China to take part.

If you are eligible to nominate, I urge you to do so. The Hugo Awards are our field’s oldest and most prestigious awards… and they are a FAN award, given by readers and viewers, not by a jury. It is a huge honor to win one… and a proud and noble thing to lose one too. I speak from experience. I’ve won a few, and lost a lot more, even helped found the Hugo Losers Party with the late great Gardner Dozois.

It has been a few years since I last did one of these “eligibility posts” that have become so common in the past decade or so. In large part, that’s because I did not put out anything that was eligible… aside from various Wild Cards stories and books, which qualified me in the “Editor – Short Form” category. That’s true for 2022 as well. FULL HOUSE, a hardcover collection of Wild Cards stories from Tor.com, came out in mid-year, and a number of older volumes in the series were reprinted in trade paperback and mass market. We also released the American edition of THREE KINGS, a Wild Cards mosaic novel edited by Melinda M. Snodgrass, so she is eligible in Editor as well.

I might also mention that Tor.com featured two more Wild Cards originals during the year:

GROW, by Carrie Vaughn https://www.tor.com/2022/07/20/grow-carrie-vaughn/

HEARTS OF STONE, by Emma Newman https://www.tor.com/2022/05/18/hearts-of-stone-emma-newman/

Lovely stories both, and they are also eligible for nomination. You can read them — for FREE — at the links above.

Editing was not all I did in 2022. I also did some work in television as an executive producer and co-creator of a new series on HBO. You may have heard of it. It was called HOUSE OF THE DRAGON.

The series debuted in August and ran until late October, making it eligible for nomination in either of the two Dramatic Presentation categories in the Hugo Awards. Either… but not both. The rules there are a little complex. Fans can nominate the show in both Short Form and Long Form, but it won’t appear on the ballot in both categories; if a series gets enough votes in both categories, one has to make a choice. (This happened to GAME OF THRONES twice, as it happens).

The entire first season — ten episodes, each approximately one hour long — can be nominated in Long Form, where it will compete against the year’s biggest movies (or possibly seasons of other TV shows). The first season of GAME OF THRONES was nominated in Long Form.

The usual category for television shows is Short Form, however; there it is individual episodes that are nominated, not entire seasons or the show as a whole. It helps to know the titles of the episodes if you want to nominate your favorites.

Here the first season episodes of HOUSE OF THE DRAGON:

101    The Heirs of the Dragon
102    The Rogue Prince
103    Second of His Name
104    King of the Narrow Sea
105    We Light the Way
106   The Princess and the Queen
107   Driftmark
108 The Lord of the Tides
109 The Green Council
110 The Black Queen

You can nominate as many episodes of a series as you like… but these days, only three will make the ballot. (In decades past, there were years when a popular series would completely fill the ballot, but that’s not allowed any longer). All the listed episodes were first televised in 2022, so they are all eligible.

HOUSE OF THE DRAGON was adapted from portions of FIRE & BLOOD, Archmaester Gyldayn’s history of the Targaryen dynasty from Aegon’s Conquest to the regency of Aegon III. Unlike the various volumes of A SONG OF ICE & FIRE, FIRE & BLOOD was not a novel, but rather an imaginary history. Though it is still in print, it was first published in 2018, and is not eligible for a Hugo. However, in November 2022, my publishers on both sides of the Atlantic released RISE OF THE DRAGON.

RISE, if anything, is even harder to categorize than FIRE & BLOOD. Definitely not a novel, it covers the same period and the same events as Archmaester Glydayn’s history, but in far less detail. Elio M. Garcia Jr. and Linda Antonsson of the Westeros website did the abridgement. The text is only a small part of the book, however. RISE OF THE DRAGON is a lavishly illustrated coffee-table sized volume featuring 150 original paintings by fantasy artists from all over the world. Myself, I think it is gorgeous, but then, I am hardly objective.

The Hugo Awards have no category for art books, and RISE does not fit in novel… so if you would like to nominate it, the appropriate category would be RELATED WORK. That’s a bit of a grab bag category that in the past has included not only art books, but critical studies, biographies, speeches, memoirs, and… ah… other, stranger stuff.

Bottom line, though, you should nominate what you love best. That’s what gives the Hugo its meaning.

Nominations close APRIL 30.

And remember, only worldcon members can cast a ballot.

The rocket rules.

Tags: editing, hugo awards, television, wild cards, worldcon

Three Kings, One Throne

March 21, 2023 at 8:14 am

((No, no, not the Iron Throne. An entirely different throne, on an entirely different world. There are lots of worlds, you know. Lots of books. Lots of thrones)).

The queen is dead. Long live the king.

Ah… but which king? Charles III, you say? Well, maybe in this world. But not in the world of the Wild Cards, which diverged from our own reality on September 15, 1946, when Jetboy died in the skies over Manhattan. History was never the same.

Elizabeth II never took the throne of the United Kingdom in that world. It was her younger sister Margaret who ascended after the passing of their father, King George VI, and it is Queen Margaret I whose long reign has just come to an end there. Her eldest son is about to succeed her as King Henry IX… but his younger brother has his own designs on the crown, and dreams of being Richard IV… and if the whispers can be believed, there may be another claimant as well, a joker prince hidden away for half a century.

Who will claim the throne? To find out you’ll need to check out THREE KINGS, volume twenty-nine in the Wild Cards series (but have no fear, you do not need to read the first twenty-eight to enjoy this one). Tor is releasing the trade paperback edition today, and you will find it at your local bookstore or your favorite online bookseller.

(

Melinda M. Snodgrass stepped up as editor this time around… no easy task, as THREE KINGS is a mosaic novel, with the storylines interwoven from start to finish. The writing team consisted of Melinda herself, Peter Newman, Mary Ann Mohanraj, Peadar O Guilin, and Caroline Spector. Featured characters included Double Helix, the Green Man, Badh, the Seamstress, Enigma, and the aforementioned three wannabee kings. Yours truly was the assistant editor.

Some of you like signed books, I know. Have no fear: we will have them soon at Beastly Books in Santa Fe, autographed by both of the editors, Melinda and yours truly. The other signatures you’ll need to run down yourself. You can place your orders with Beastly at https://www.beastlybooks.com/

Beastly Books has signed copies of all the other Wild Cards books as well… along with autographed editions (hardcovers and paperbacks both) of that other series of mine, the one where the throne is made of iron. (Queen Elizabeth II visited our GOT set in Belfast once, and declined to sit in it. Smart woman. That thing is dangerous. All those rusty old swords. You could cut yourself).

Current Mood: busy busy

Tags: Beastly Books, editing, signed books, wild cards

Before We Were Us

February 15, 2023 at 7:18 pm

We all have to start somewhere, even National Treasures like Howard Waldrop.

Howard — or H’ard, as our mutual friend Gardner Dozois used to call him — came into this world on September 15, 1946, which makes him even older than me. (Yes, that is also the day Jetboy died and the wild card virus was loosed upon an unsuspecting world, which is not as coincidental as you might think). He started making up stories almost immediately, before he could even talk. I think his first word was “Shemp,” but that may be an urban legend. It was a couple of years before he started writing, but once his little hands were strong enough to start pounding the keys on a manual typewriter, there was no stopping him. He wrote and wrote and wrote. And no one wrote like H’ard.

Eventually people began publishing his stories. Fanzine editors at first. Howard was there at the birth of comics fanzines in the 1960s, the same as I was. That was how we met, back in 1962, when I bought a copy of BRAVE & BOLD #28 (Starro the Conquerer, yay!) for a quarter. Howard had only paid a dime for it, so he made a big profit. He was always a canny businessman. We started corresponding after that, when stamps were only three cents, although we did not meet in person until a convention in Kansas City in 1972.

Those were heady days in comics fandom, and for me and Howard too. We both began to publish stories around the same time (Publish, not sell, no one was paying us a penny) in fanzines like CORTANA, HERO, and STAR-STUDDED COMICS, the big photo offset zine from the Texas Trio. (Howard lived in Texas. I did not). I was writing amateur superhero stories starring characters created by the Trio, like Powerman and Dr. Weird, and some of my own creation, like Manta Ray, the White Raider, and Garizan the Mechanical Warrior. Howard, though publishing in comics fanzines, stayed clear of superfolks (well, until Jetboy). His stories featured Roman legionaries, the Three Musketeers, hardboiled PIs in small Texas towns, a swordsman called Wanderer, the Flying Wing, and… well, pretty much anything and everything.

None of us knew quite what to make of Howard, or his stories. But we loved them.

In the due course of time, the prozines started to take note as well. Howard’s first professional sale was a story called “Lunchbox,” which the legendary John W. Campbell Jr. bought for ANALOG a few weeks before he died. I made my first sale right around the same time, a story called “The Hero,” to GALAXY. Other sales followed, for both of us. Eventually both of us had published enough stories to publish collections. Howard called his HOWARD WHO?

But we knew.

He did not include everything in HOWARD WHO? though. He left out some of his early professional sales, and of course all those fanzine stories. Some of those had been published on ditto’ed fanzines that were fading more with every passing day, and were in danger of being lost to the ages.

We couldn’t have that. So I got together with my friend Bradley Denton (an amazing writer himself, author of BUDDY HOLLY IS ALIVE AND WELL ON GANYMEDE, which really needs to be a movie), and we put together a collection of Howard’s early work, most of it long out of print. We call it H’ARD STARTS: The Early Waldrop.

I’ve never edited an anthology that was more fun. We’ve got the Wanderer stories here, we’ve got Howard’s con reports (including his account of our first meeting), we’ve got “Lunchbox” and “Billy Big-Eyes” and “My Sweet Lady Jo,” and the never-before published “Davy Crockett Shoots the Moon,” a couple of plays he wrote in college, his essays for Crawdaddy (the one about the Flying Wing still moves me), even a sketch he wrote for Red Skelton, who did not buy it. (Imagine if he had, and Howard had gone on to a career writing comedy for television. That’s a truly Waldropian alternate world).

But there’s more than just fiction here. Brad sat down with Howard for days, and compiled an amazing set of interviews about the history of every one of these pieces. Howard’s recollections are not always accurate (I was there for some of them), but they are funny, and moving, and give us a peek into his own life, and the lost world we lived in during the 60s and 70s.

And now Subterranean Press is bringing it out, in one of their gorgeous limited edition hardcovers.

Here’s the pre-order page: https://subterraneanpress.com/hstew/

All the money from the sale of H’ARD STARTS will be going to Howard himself.

Oh, and I almost forgot. All of the books are SIGNED. By Brad Denton. By yours truly. And by the one and only Howard Waldrop, his own self, sage of Austin, father of Jetboy, National Treasure.

Get yours now.

Current Mood: pleased pleased

Tags: editing, fandom, friends, writing

Back in Print Again

December 29, 2020 at 9:24 am

I have been an editor almost as long as I have been a professional writer (I have been a writer since forever, but I was not a pro until I made my first sale to GALAXY in 1970).

The first anthology I ever edited was NEW VOICES IN SCIENCE FICTION, featuring original stories by the finalists for the very first John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. (I was one of those finalists. I lost, but editing the book made up for that). That came out in hardcover in 1975. I would ultimately edit six of those annual (well, in theory) Campbell Award anthologies. Five were actually published.

My longest running editorial gig is, of course, WILD CARDS, which started in 1987 and is still going strong today. (We did have a seven year hiatus in there, but never mind). Over the decades, twenty-nine volumes of Wild Cards have been published, and I’ve edited twenty-seven-and-a-half of them. (Melinda Snodgrass edited THREE KINGS, and we co-edited LOWBALL). The thirtieth book in the series, JOKER MOON, will be released in 2021, and the thirty-first, a collection of stories from Tor.com, will follow in short order. Three more volumes are under contract and I am working on them now; look for them in 2022 and 2023. Wild Cards is a shared world. Editing the mosaics, weaving the stories together, is the most difficult and demanding sort of editing there is, in my opinion, but I love it.

The most enjoyable editorial work I’ve ever done, however, was on the crossgenre anthologies I co-edited with Gardner Dozois.

Gardner was an old friend, and a dear friend, the first person I ever met at the very first SF con I ever attended, and the guy who fished me out of the slushpile. He was also one of the greatest editors in the history of science fiction and fantasy. He edited ASIMOV’S for decades, and put together his massive landmark BEST volumes annually. He won the Hugo for Best Professional Editor sixteen times, a record unlikely to be broken. Working with him was always such a joy. Gardner and I had hoped to do many more anthologies together… but he was taken from us in 2018.

I still miss him, still mourn him. I always will.

Editors, like writers, survive in their work, however, and I am pleased to announce that one of the books we did together, SONGS OF LOVE & DEATH, has just been re-released in a new edition.

This one was Gardner’s idea, as I recall. He wanted to title it STAR-CROSSED LOVERS, which I rather like, but the publisher wanted “Death” in there, and of course the “Songs” in the title evoked many of my own collections. A rose by any other name, however…. whatever the title, it was a fun book to edit, and we put together a wonderful lineup of contributors. As with WARRIORS, ROGUES, and DANGEROUS WOMEN, this was a crossgenre book, featuring writers from many different fields. We were very pleased with how it came out.

If you have not read it, check it out. Copies available from your local bookstore or favorite online bookseller… and, of course, from Beastly Books at https://jeancocteaucinema.com/beastlybooks/

Current Mood: satisfied

Tags: anthologies, editing

Hugo Night 2019

September 8, 2019 at 10:00 am

The annual presentation of the Hugo Awards is always one of the high points of worldcon. I have been attending the Hugo ceremony since my very first worldcon in 1971. The awards were presented at a dinner back then, and I could not afford a ticket (they were priced outrageously, at something like seven bucks), so I watched the proceedings from a balcony, standing. Robert Silverberg presided, and it was all incredibly exciting.

Fast forward to this year’s Hugo Awards in Dublin. They had their own excitements, perhaps more than any year since 2015 in Spokane, the Year of the Puppies (and, more happily, the Alfies). Let’s just say they were… fraught, with some amazing high points and a few low ones. Of course, your view of which points were high and which were low may vary from mine.

There were many worthy winners, to be sure… and as ever, many losers that were also rocket-worthy. Since I feel more like Thumper than Alice Roosevelt Longworth today, let me focus on my favorite parts.

Like Charles Vess. The artist category had some amazing talents nominated this year, and I was seated right next to one, the incredible John Picacio. But John was applauding just as loudly as me when Vess won for Best Professional Artist. A very well deserved win for an artist not previously honored. And then, just moments later, Charles returned to the stage to collect the Hugo for Best Art Book as well, for his illustrated edition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea stories. A double win!!! Lots of people win Hugos every year, but winning two in a single night is a rare accomplishment (I did it myself in 1980, the second person to do so, and it remains one of the high points of my career). And with Charles Vess, it really could not have happened to a nicer guy. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Vess in the past… he illustrated the limited edition of A STORM OF SWORDS… and he really is as sweet, genial, and pleasant as he appears, in addition to being enormously gifted. Nice guys DON’T always finish last, kids. I am hoping to be able to work with Charles Vess again, soon… I have just the project in mind. But we shall see.

I will never be able to work with Gardner Dozois again, sadly… but Gardner’s victory as Best Professional Editor (Short Form) was the other highlight of the evening for me… and for many, many, many others who loved Gardner, had the privilege of being edited by him, or the simple joy of knowing him. I have edited a lot of anthologies of my own over the decades, but I’ve never enjoyed doing any of them so much as I enjoyed the ones I did with Gargy: SONGS OF THE DYING EARTH, WARRIORS, DANGEROUS WOMEN, ROGUES, SONGS OF LOVE & DEATH, DOWN THESE STRANGE STREETS, OLD MARS, OLD VENUS. We wanted to do more, but alas, it was not to be. Gardner left us all too soon, and a lot of laughter and love left the world when he did.

But on Hugo night, when his name was read out one last time, a bit of it returned, just for a moment. His son Christopher Casper was on hand to accept the award for him… and just as Gargy would have, he said the award really belonged to the writers. Gardner said pretty much the same thing every time he won a Hugo, and he won a lot of them… deservedly.

I am not a believer in any afterlife, and I don’t think that Gardner was either… so as nice as it would be to think that he was looking down on us from the Secret Pro Party in the Sky, I can’t. But the award certainly meant the world to Christopher, to me, to all of Gardner’s other friends, and to the myriads of writers, the generations of writers, who filled the pages of ASIMOV’S during Gardner’s tenure there, who learned from him at Clarion and other workshops, who were fished out of one slush pile or another by the pre-eminent editor of his times (I was one of those). No one knew our genre better, no one discovered more new talent, and no one had a better eye for a good story… or a better sense of how to make a flawed story work… than Gardner Dozois. And no award that was handed out in Dublin last month was more well deserved than Gardner’s last Hugo.

I also want to say a word or two in praise of Michael Scott and Afua Richardson, the hosts and presenters on Hugo night, who kept the ceremony moving at a nice pace under sometimes trying circumstances. Scott was eloquent and informative, and Richardson provided one of the most moving moments of the night when she spoke of the influence that Nichelle Nichols had upon her life and career. Afua also sang beautifully and played the flute.

All of which was tremendously intimidating. Next year worldcon is in New Zealand and I’m the Toastmaster, so it will be be my task to present the Hugos. Afua is a helluva hard act to follow. You really don’t want to hear me sing. Maybe I should start taking flute lessons….

Current Mood: contemplative

Tags: awards, editing, hugo awards, worldcon

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