Knaves, Knaves Everywhere!

August 13, 2019 at 7:32 am

The British are coming, the British are coming, the British are..

Oh, wait. The British are HERE.

Today’s the official publication day for the release of the first American edition of KNAVES OVER QUEENS, in hardcovers from our friends at Tor Books. ((The British edition came out a year ago, in June 2018)). Look for it at your favorite local bookshop, or order it from your favorite online bookseller.

KNAVES OVER QUEENS is the twenty-sixth volume in the Wild Cards series… and the first to be set (mostly) in the British Isles. Like our very first volume, the action begins in 1946, when the wild card virus was first unleashed upon the world by Dr. Tod and those dastardly Takisians. WILD CARDS spanned forty years, from 1946 to 1986, but the focus was on the U.S., and New York City in particular. KNAVES OVER QUEENS covers an even longer time-span, right up to (almost) the present, but the view is from the other side of the Pond this time.

Our writers are a mix of English and Irish authors, many joining Wild Cards for the first time, and several American Anglophiles. The lineup:

KEVIN ANDREW MURPHY: “A Flint Lies in the Mud” and “But a Flint Holds Fire,”
PEADAR O GUILIN: “The Coming of the Crow,” “Cracks in the City,” and “Feeding on the Entrails,”
CAROLINE SPECTOR: “Needles and Pins,”
PAUL CORNELL: “Night Orders,”
CHARLES STROSS: “Police On My Back,”
MARKO KLOOS: “Probationary,”
PETER NEWMAN: “Twisted Logic,”
MELINDA M. SNODGRASS: “Ceremony of Innocence,”
EMMA NEWMAN: “How to Turn a Girl to Stone,”
MARK LAWRENCE: “The Visitor.”

Long- time fan favorites Captain Flint and Double Helix return in KNAVES, but you’ll also be meeting some terrific new aces, jokers, and (yes) knaves, including the Seamstress, the blood-thirsty Badh, the Green Man, Stonemaiden, and the Visitor.

Come on in and make their acquaintance.

Current Mood: bouncy bouncy

Tags: anthologies, editing, tor, wild cards

Chicago Gets Low

July 16, 2019 at 7:02 am

Hey, Wild Cards fans — did you miss LOW CHICAGO when it came out in hardcover last year?

No problem, you’ve got another chance. Our friends at Tor are releasing LOW CHCAGO today in paperback. You should be able to snag a copy at your favorite local bookstore (and if they don’t stock Wild Cards, find another favorite) or online bookseller.

An editor, like a parent, is supposed to love all his children equally… but c’mon, truth be told, parents have favorites and so do editors. LOW CHICAGO is one of mine. Maybe because I lived in the Windy City for several years when I was a starving young writer. Whatever the reason, this one was a delight to edit, and (I think) a ton of fun to read. Shared world books are the Rodney Dangerfield of anthologies; they get no respect at awards time (like shared world editors, though imnsho they are way harder to put together than an ordinary anthology). Which is a pity, because I think there are several stories in LOW CHICAGO that were worthy of Hugo and Nebula nominations. But hey, I’m hardly objective. You are all invited to read the book and decide for yourself. In the end it doesn’t matter. The awards are done, but the work remains, and it’s work that I am proud of… as are my contributors.

The lineup for LOW CHICAGO:

“A Long Night at the Palmer House” by John Jos. Miller
“Down the Rabbit Hole” by Kevin Andrew Murphy
“The Motherfucking Apotheosis of Todd Motherfucking Taszycki” by Christopher Rowe
“A Bit of a Dinosaur” by Paul Cornell
“‘Stripes” by Marko Kloos
“The Sister in the Streets” by Melinda M. Snodgrass
“A Beautiful Facade” by Mary Anne Mohanraj
“Meathooks on Ice” by Saladin Ahmed

Oh, and if you’re one of those who prefers hardcovers to paperbacks, have no fear. We have plenty of copies of the LOW CHICAGO hardback in stock at the bookstore at the Jean Cocteau Cinema, most of them AUTOGRAPHED… not just by me, but by many of the contributing authors.

Check out all the signed books at:

https://jeancocteaucinema.com/product-category/signed-books/

Current Mood: pleased pleased

Tags: anthologies, editing, tor, wild cards

Sharing A World

February 6, 2019 at 5:18 pm

Back in the 80s, when Wild Cards was born, shared worlds ruled the racks. THIEVES WORLD, ITHKAR, WAR WORLD, LIAVEK, HEROES IN HELL, GREYSTONE BAY, and on and on. New series were popping up every month. Today, only Wild Cards remains, still going strong after thirty-one years and twenty-seven volumes.

Writing for a shared world has some unique challenges, however. In August 2017, a large group of Wild Carders assembled at my Jean Cocteau Cinema in Santa Fe for a mass signing, and we interviewed them about the up and downs of writing other people’s characters, and having other people write yours.

Enjoy.

Current Mood: bouncy bouncy

Tags: anthologies, editing, tor, wild cards, writing

Hugo Recommendations – Editor

January 18, 2019 at 9:16 am

As I was saying… nominations are now open for the 2019 Hugo Awards, to be presented this August in Dublin. You need to be a member of either the Dublin worldcon, or last year’s gathering in San Jose, to nominate.

There are two rockets given for editing. As with drama, the editorial awards are split into Long Form and Short Form. In simple terms, the Long Form award is for those who edit books (novels, mostly), and the Short Form for magazine and anthology editors. (Before they split the award, the magazine editors won everything, and the book editors got nothing).

Lots and lots of good editors out there.

In Long Form, I recommend you strongly consider two of my own editors: ANNE LESLEY GROELL of Bantam Spectra/ Random Penguin in the US, and JANE JOHNSON of Harper Collins Voyager in the UK. Anne and Jane have both been doing amazing work for decades, and have been criminally unrecognized. Anne has only been nominated for a Hugo once, and Jane has never been a finalist at all… though she has been one of the major players in the British SF scene for as long as I can remember, and has built Voyager into one of the top UK genre publishers. Last year, both of them did some incredible work… especially for me. They were the editors on FIRE & BLOOD, my book of imaginary Westerosi history. Let’s look beyond the usual suspects this year, and nominate these two amazing women.

In Short Form… well, we have the usual suspects here as well, in a category usually dominated by the editors of the major magazines, both print and electronic. Anthology editors are eligible as well, however, so let me blush modestly and suggest that perhaps you might consider… well… me.

I have been editing the Wild Cards series since 1987, thirty one years and counting, and we’ve published some amazing stories over the years. I’ve edited my share of reprint anthologies and theme anthologies (many with Gardner Dozois), demanding gigs both, but neither one is as tenth as hard as editing a shared world anthology and pulling it all together. I did come in seventh on the long list once for my editorial work on Wild Cards (back when five works made the ballot), a decade or so back, but that’s the closest I’ve ever come. (No matter, it’s a labor of love, I sure don’t do it for the money). Wild Cards had an especially strong year in 2018, I believe. Though I’ve lost lots of Hugos as a writer, I’ve never lost one as a editor. Maybe this is the year.

Current Mood: hopeful hopeful

Tags: anthologies, awards, editing, hugo awards

Editing with Gardner

June 17, 2018 at 9:00 am

It has been a few weeks since Gardner Dozois died. I’m still having a hard time coming to grips with it. He was such a huge presence in the field, such a gigantic personality, it still seems inconceivable that he’s gone. I posted about our friendship below, about the laughter he brought with him wherever he went… but I wanted to write about his legacy as an editor as well.

It’s been harder than I anticipated. Every time I start this post, it hits me all over again, and I realize that I will never see him again.

I need to say something, though. Not for Gardner — there are dozens of memorials all over the net, speaking of his talents — but for myself.

There’s really not much that I can say that has not already been said. As an editor, I think, Gardner had few peers. Over the decades our genre has been fortunate in having a succession of amazing editors: H.L. Gold, Anthony Boucher, Terry Carr, Damon Knight, Robert Silverberg, Donald A. Wollheim, Cele Goldsmith Lalli, Ellen Datlow, Ben Bova, Ted White, Fred Pohl, and Groff Conklin all come to mind, and many more. But two figures tower above them all: John W. Campbell, the editorial genius who gave SF its Golden Age, for whom not one but two memorial awards are named… and Gardner Dozois. His stint as editor of Asimov’s can rightly be compared only with Campbell’s decades at Astounding and Analog, and was similarly influential. He discovered and nurtured more new talents than I could possibly remember or recount… among them, myself. Not at Asimov’s, no. I was already well established before Gardner got that gig. No, he found me long before, in his first editorial job… reading the slush pile at Galaxy. It was in that pile, in the summer of 1970, that he came across my short story “The Hero,” and passed it along to editor Ejler Jakobsson with a recommendation to buy. That was my first professional sale, and came during the summer between my senior and graduate years at Northwestern, when I starting to seriously contemplate what I wanted to do with my life. That sale, and the publication that followed, went a long way toward making that decision for me. It’s no exaggeration to say that I might not be where I am today if Gardner had not fished me out of the slush pile in 1970.

Many decades later, I had the honor and privilege of working beside Gardner on a series of anthologies that I am still very proud of. We were both huge Jack Vance fans, so the idea of a doing a Dying Earth anthology was a natural for us… and when Jack gave us permission, we were thrilled. SONGS OF THE DYING EARTH was a tribute anthology as well, and the best kind: one that Jack Vance was actually able to read and appreciate while he was still with us. I hope he liked reading that book (the tributes at least) as much as Gardner and I liked doing it.

I’ve never met anyone who was as well read in SF and fantasy as Gardner Dozois, but like me, that was never all he read. He loved mysteries and thrillers and historicals as well; so long as the tales were gripping and well told, he never cared what the imprint was on the spine. So the next thing we tackled after the Vance books were the crossgenre anthologies: massive books with very broad themes, featuring work from outstanding writers from a dozen different genres. WARRIORS was the first. It did so well that we soon followed it with DANGEROUS WOMEN and ROGUES. Those did even better. They won awards, got great reviews, and even more importantly, introduced thousands of readers to some great new writers they might never have encountered, if we hadn’t put them between covers with their familiar favorites. Gardner and I did a couple of fun genre mash-ups as well. There was DOWN THESE STRANGE STREETS, crossing private eye stories with fantasy and SF, and SONGS OF LOVE AND DEATH, an SF/ fantasy/ romance hybrid.

Last, but definitely not least, were our two “retro SF’ collections, OLD MARS and OLD VENUS. Damn, those were fun to do. Gardner and I shared a deep deep affection for the lost solar system of our youth, the Mars of the canals and dead cities and vanished races, the Venus of endless swamps and dinosaurs and web-footed Venusians. And we discovered, to our delight, that a lot of writers shared that love, and had been waiting all their lives for a chance to set a story on the Mars and Venus of yore. Those books were easy to edit; we had to beat off writers with a stick. Both books won awards.

The sad part is, it ended there. I didn’t want it to. Neither did Gardner. I loved working with him, and we had more anthologies we wanted to do. We wanted to follow OLD MARS and OLD VENUS with OLD LUNA, and maybe down the line OLD MERCURY, or a book set in the asteroids. Done retro, like the first two. We talked about doing more crossgenre books. A second WARRIORS, a second ROGUES, a second DANGEROUS WOMEN, maybe one called VILLAINS or HEROES or (this would have been fun) SIDEKICKS. The publishers were interested. The earlier books had sold very well. Gardner was interested. I was the one who demurred. As proud as I was of those books, as much as I enjoyed working with Gardner, I did not have the time. WINDS OF WINTER was late and getting later, and the editing had taken more of my time and energy than I thought it would. “I can’t take on anything more right now,” I told him. “We’ll do them later, once I’ve delivered WINDS.” So Gardner went on to edit THE BOOK OF SWORDS and THE BOOK OF MAGIC by himself (he could have edited all these books by himself, he never actually needed me, we just enjoyed working together). I contributed stories to both books (a reprint to MAGIC, since I did not have the time). There would be plenty of time to do ROGUES 2 and OLD LUNA and SIDEKICKS and all the rest, after all. All the time we needed. Just as soon as I got King Kong off my back… we even kicked around the notion of a reprint anthology we wanted to call THE HUGO LOSERS. After all, we were the guys who founded the Hugo Losers Party… just yesterday, in 1976….

We’d do all these books tomorrow. Next month. Next year. Real soon now.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…

He’s gone now, and I fear he has taken all those books with him. I may edit other anthologies in the future (in addition to the Wild Cards series, which I imagine I’ll be editing till I join Gargy at the Great Worldcon in the Sky), but I could never bring myself to edit those particular books, the ones we had talked about doing together. It just wouldn’t feel right.

Gardner Dozois won fifteen Hugo Awards as Best Editor, a record that will never be broken, I expect. He and I won some Locus Awards and a World Fantasy Award as well, and I will always cherish those. It was an honor to know him, and to work with him. I miss him so much.

Current Mood: melancholy

Tags: anthologies, editing, life and death

The British Are Coming!

March 12, 2018 at 8:47 pm

The British are coming! The British are coming!!

The British Wild Cards, that is. Aces, jokers, deuces, and a few knaves too.

Oh, and an Irish guy as well.

They will be here on June 28. That’s when HarperCollins Voyager has scheduled the hardcover release of the latest Wild Cards anthology, KNAVES OVER QUEENS, edited by yours truly (with the able assistance of Melinda M. Snodgrasss, as usual) and featuring all new stories by veteran Wild Carders Kevin Andrew Murphy, Caroline Spector, Melinda Snodgrass, Paul Cornell, and Marko Stross and newcomers Charlie Stross, Peter Newman, Emma Newman, Mark Lawrence, and Peadar O Gulian.

The one is something new for Wild Cards: the first time that the British edition of one of the books will be published in advance of the American edition. But it’s only fitting in this case, since KNAVES OVER QUEENS harkens back to our very first volume (WILD CARDS, of course), and tells the story of the entire history of the Wild Cards universe in the UK and Ireland, starting back in 1946 and going right up to the present day.

The lineup this time around:

June will be a huge month for Wild Cards, actually, since we also have LOW CHICAGO scheduled for hardcover publication that month from Tor, on June 12. LOW CHICAGO will be available only in the US edition, and KNAVES OVER QUEENS will be available only in the UK, so completists and first edition collectors are going to have a challenge (yes, there will eventually be a British edition of LOW CHICAGO and an American edition of KNAVES OVER QUEENS, but those will be a bit down the line). Fans of the Wild Cards universe will have a great time, though. Just thing of all those great new stories!

Keep reading, friends. You can’t die yet, you haven’t seen the Jolson Story.

Current Mood: excited excited

Tags: anthologies, editing, tor, voyager, wild cards

See Ya Later, Kids

March 5, 2018 at 12:25 pm

All’s good, boys and girls… lots of exciting things going on.

LOTS of exciting things.

Maybe too many. I am buried in work, so much that it is starting to overwhelm me. Even with my army of loyal minions.

So I am going to step back from blogging — okay, from NOT-a-blogging — for a while, till I get a few of these monkeys off my back.

In the near future, you’ll likely see fewer posts here. And some of those will be by my minions.

I’ll return eventually. Just don’t know when.

See ya later, alligators.

Current Mood: stressed

Tags: editing, television and film, writing

Cool New Wild Cards Stuff

February 28, 2018 at 1:48 pm

Katie Rask has done a lovely tribute to Vic Milan and two of his iconic Wild Cards characters over at Tor.com:

https://www.tor.com/2018/02/28/a-wild-cards-tribute-to-victor-milan/

Do check it out, and feel free to jump in with your own thoughts about Vic’s contributions to Wild Cards, which were numerous and important.

Meanwhile, over on our official Wild Cards website, we’ve added some new blog posts from Max Gladstone, Melinda Snodgrass, and David Anthony Durham. You’ll find them at:

http://www.wildcardsworld.com/blog/

In other Wild Cards news, the reissues continue apace, and I’ve just delivered a new and expanded version of volume nine, JOKERTOWN SHUFFLE, to Tor. We’ve added two brand new stories to the original text from the 1991 Bantam edition: a Ramshead tale by Cherie Priest, and a Lady Black story from Carrie Vaughn. JOKERTOWN SHUFFLE has been out of print in English for more twenty years, so we’re pleased to make it available to a new generation of readers… but be careful, if there was ever a Wild Cards book that required trigger warnings, it’s this one.

((Comments permitted, on Wild Cards only. Stay on topic)).

Current Mood: contemplative

Tags: editing, wild cards

Hugo Nominations Open

February 7, 2018 at 2:53 pm

Nominations for the 2018 Hugo Awards have now opened, I am informed. If you are a member of last year’s worldcon in Helsinki, this year’s worldcon in San Jose, or next year’s worldcon in Dublin, you are eligible to nominate. You should be receiving an email with a link to the ballot. (I have not actually received mine yet, but I’m told that others have, so I expect mine Real Soon Now).

I have a few things eligible for nomination myself this year… more for editing than writing, however.

GAME OF THRONES is eligible in the Dramatic Presentation category, of course. The whole of Season 7 can be nominated in Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, and any or all of the individual episodes can be nominated in Short Form. GOT has won in both categories in the past. Last year in Helsinki, three episodes actually had enough votes to make the ballot, but the new rule limits any series to no more than two places on the ballot, so we had to withdraw one. But you can nominate as many episodes as you like.

Wild Cards had a big year last year. We celebrated the 30th Anniversary of the series, and our twenty-fourth mosaic novel, MISSISSIPPI ROLL, was published in the fall. A couple of the older books were reissued, and we had two original Wild Cards story on Tor.com — “When the Devil Drives” by Melinda M. Snodgrass, and “The Atonement Tango” by Stephen Leigh. The two Tor.com stories are both novelettes and are eligible in that category. MISSISSIPPI ROLL is a more complex case. Like most Wild Cards books, it is a mosaic novel, with individual stories by half a dozen writers woven together to make a whole that is, we hope, more than the sum of its parts. One could argue that our mosaics are anthologies, I suppose… but they feel more like collaborative novels to me. If the former view prevails, the individual components of MISSISSIPPI ROLL are eligible in the short fiction categories, Steve Leigh’s “In the Shadow of Tall Stacks” in novella, the other stories as novelettes. If the latter, the volume as a whole could be nominated in novel.

In either case, I’m eligible for nomination in the editing categories. Short Form, most likely, for the stories in Tor.com as well as the book. (If you consider MISSISSIPPI ROLL a novel, then it counts for me as a Long Form editor, but I don’t think one book is enough to make me eligible in that category). My Wild Cards work was the only editing I did in 2017. The big cross-genre anthologies I co-edited with Gardner Dozois all came out in previous years.

Wild Cards as a whole is definitely eligible for nomination as Best Series. That’s a new category that first appeared on the ballot last year, as an experiment, but now it has been made permanent.

The only writing I had published in 2017 was “The Sons of the Dragon,” which was published in THE BOOK OF SWORDS, Gardner Dozois’s massive anthology of original sword & sorcery stories. Like “The Rogue Prince” and “The Princess and the Queen” before it, “Sons” is more of my (fake) history of the Targaryen kings of Westeros. By length, it is a novella… but it’s not a traditional narrative. By design, it reads like history, not fiction; but since the history is entirely imaginative, it’s still fiction, even if dressed up as (fake) non-fiction.

It has been pointed out to me that the publication of “The Sons of the Dragon” makes the entirety of A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE eligible to be nominated as Best Series. I suppose that’s so. All I can say to that is : please don’t. If you like fake history and enjoyed “The Sons of the Dragon,” by all means nominate the story as a novella… but it’s really not part of A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, and sneaking in the entire series by means of a technicality seems wrong to me.

If I may broaden the discussion a bit, while I think it is good that the Hugo Awards now have a category to recognize series books, I would quibble somewhat with how a “series” is defined. The rules were written very broadly, to include not only true series, like last year’s winner, the Vorkosigan series by Lois McMaster Bujold, but also any grouping of stories set against a common background, what we used to call “future histories,” as well as what I’d term “mega-novels,” those massive epics too long to be contained in a single volume. Three-quarters of the SF I wrote back in the 70s was set against a common background, but I never considered that I was writing a series when I visited the Thousand Worlds; it was a future history, made up of stories set hundreds of years apart, on planets separated by thousands of light years (though within the future history there was a series, the Haviland Tuf stories). On the other extreme, I don’t consider A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE a series either; it’s one single story, being published in (we hope) seven volumes. FWIW, Tolkien wasn’t writing a series when he wrote LORD OF THE RINGS either. He wrote a big novel and his publisher divided it into three parts, none of which stands on its own.

Anyway, that’s my own perspective on the matter. Obviously, the good folks who drafted the Best Series rules disagree. Ultimately I think the fans will decide the matter by what they choose to nominate. Worldcon committees have traditionally been reluctant to overrule the fans, even in cases where a nominated work would seem to be ineligible for one reason or other.

FWIW, Wild Cards is a series, plainly, so if you want to consider any of my work for Best Series, that’s the one I’d ask you to look at. Thirty-one years and twenty=four books is something to be proud of, and I am.

Regardless of whether or not you nominate any of my own work, I do urge all the worldcon members reading this to be sure to nominate. There are a lot of awards being given in SF, fantasy, and horror these days, but the Hugo was the first, and it’s still the one that means the most. It is, of course, important to vote on the final ballot too… but you can’t vote for works that have not been nominated, and it is crucial to have widespread participation in the nominating stage.

((Comments and debate allowed, but ONLY on these subjects. Stay on topic)).

Current Mood: thoughtful

Tags: editing, fake history, fire & blood, hugo awards, worldcon, writing

Wild Cards Goodness

July 19, 2017 at 10:12 pm

Some cool new stuff out there for Wild Cards fans.

Over at Tor.com, the Wild Cards Reread continues with Katie Rask’s insightful look at the fourth volume of the original series, ACES ABROAD. Check it out and join the discussion at:

https://www.tor.com/2017/07/18/religion-revolution-and-80s-politics-wild-cards-iv-aces-abroad/

And there’s some new content on the Wild Cards website as well. A new blog post by Mary Anne Mohanraj about writing an intertwined story

http://www.wildcardsworld.com/how-do-you-tell-an-interlinked-story/

and some great art uploads of work by some of our favorite artists: John Picacio, Marc Simonetti, and Michael Komarck.

((Meanwhile, development continues on the Wild Cards television series. I could tell you all about that as well, but then I’d have to kill you. Oh, yes, and the latest Wild Cards mosaic novel is nearing completion as well. Seven of ten stories in, and the last three expected soon)).

Current Mood: pleased pleased

Tags: editing, television, wild cards

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