Signs of Life

Martha Wells, The Cloud Roads. Night Shade Books 2011 (US): paperback.

A blog post! Not something that happens every day around here. I do have several half-finished potential posts written, so there may be more content here sooner rather than later. And in fact the reason for today’s post began as one of those half-finished pieces: my latest book review, of the first two volumes of a new fantasy series by Martha Wells, has been published by Strange Horizons. The books are The Cloud Roads and The Serpent Sea; the series is called The Books of the Raksura. I had started writing something on The Cloud Roads last year, but gave it up as too similar to things I had already written when reviewing the author’s previous book. Reading the second book in the series this year made me want to revisit and finish the piece, if only to sort through my own conflicted feelings about the series so far.

When I’m reviewing an unfinished series I like to make some sort of public guess or prediction about future content–a way of putting myself on the line a bit, of testing whether I’ve understood the pattern of information and possibilities that the author has provided. I couldn’t fit that into this review–it was long enough already–so I’ll state it here. In the first book of the series, we learn that the evil Fell have begun a program of abducting young Raksura–the similar winged species to which the protagonist of the series belongs–for use as breeding stock; weaponized rape as a species survival tactic. We know that Moon, the series protagonist to-date, believes his colony of Raksura was wiped out by Fell when he was only a small child, although he was too young to remember any details. But we also know that the Fell’s breeding program has gone on for at least long enough to produce a hybrid of a similar age to Moon. So it’s not really much of a prediction to suppose that some of Moon’s siblings might in fact have been abducted rather than slain; that they might have been young enough to have fallen in with the Fell; that Moon might have hybrid relatives who he will have to confront in later volumes of the series.

But we’ll see.

Selected past reviews at other venues:

• Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing
• Elizabeth Bear, Chill
• Darin Bradley, Noise
• Avram Davidson, Adventures in Unhistory
• David Louis Edelman, MultiReal
• Theodora Goss, In the Forest of Forgetting
• Brent Hartinger, Dreamquest
• Brent Hayward, Filaria
• David Marusek, Getting to Know You
• J.M. McDermott, Last Dragon
• Patricia McKillip, Od Magic
• Geoff Ryman, Ed., When It Changed: Science Into Fiction
• Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss (eds), Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing
• Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem, The Man on the Ceiling
• Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest
• Kaaron Warren, Walking the Tree
• Peter Watts, Blindsight
• Robert Freeman Wexler, The Painting and The City
• Zoran Zivkovic, The Last Book
• Zoran Zivkovic, Seven Touches of Music
• Zoran Zivkovic, Steps Through the Mist

Strange Horizons 2011 Fund Drive

This month Strange Horizons begins its annual fund-raising drive for 2011. I’ve donated, and while I wouldn’t feel comfortable suggesting that you should, too–I don’t know you or your circumstances–I thought I might outline some of the reasons that I value Strange Horizons as I do, some of the ways it fills needs that I think are worth supporting.

Most immediately, as an occasional writer and voracious reader of in-depth reviews of fantastic fiction, I value Strange Horizons as one of the only edited, paying venues for such reviews that is freely and widely available. It is one of the very few edited online review venues unaffiliated with a book publisher; it is perhaps the only online venue that positions itself as accepting unsolicited reviews; and it is one of the few venues, online or in print, without a strong editorial bias against negative reviews. If a reviewer wants their writings to be considered seriously, openly, and widely–if a reader wants serious coverage of a wide variety of fictions–then Strange Horizons must occupy a central position of consideration. As such, Strange Horizons serves as something of a hub for independent-minded readers and writers with a deep affection for the fantastic in media, but who are generally able to distinguish between I like it and it is good.

This is a fraught distinction that I’d suggest is more important now than ever. As the publishing landscape has changed over the past decade, there have emerged not fewer gatekeepers, but more. Myriad small presses and imprints with editorial guidance tuned to myriad tastes and affinities mean that it is easy for potential readers to find any given book or story being advocated, but harder to find coverage that looks at what readers outside a targeted affinity group might make of a book. Likewise, it has become harder for readers to find reviews written with the intention of being interesting and valuable whether or not the reader goes on to read–or has already read–the book; harder to find venues that value and nurture reviews in their own right as worthwhile methods of conveying ideas. At the same time, it has also become harder for authors of fiction to garner balanced feedback on their work; for an author this new media world must seem divided into fans and haters. With editors less able to spend time actually editing, the only detailed feedback writers may receive to measure their success and improve their craft must now come mainly from other sources, such as reviews. By striving to provide all of this, Strange Horizons reviews thus serve an invaluable role to multiple audiences.

Of course, Strange Horizons publishes more than reviews. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of the publication has been its inclusiveness of material. Strange Horizons is one of the few paying markets to treat poetry as integral rather than a separate niche; it is a regular part of each weekly issue. It was one of the first online venues to integrate art, although that has diminished–perhaps due to lack of funds. And of course Strange Horizons has been publishing leading-edge fiction for more than a decade. Fantasy, science fiction, horror, slipstream, interstitial: the determining factors of publication in Strange Horizons are not category but quality, an avoidance of the clichés that are the bread and butter of many other story markets, and a contemporary attitude toward intersections–between normal and strange, past and future, known and unknown. You never know quite what you’re going to get with a Strange Horizons story, except that it will be something that deserves publication. This is its excellence for readers, and as a market for writers.

Recently I have been volunteering time to help proofread some of the older issues of Strange Horizons in preparation for a revamped website. It’s been an eye-opening experience to discover (or in some cases, rediscover) so many gems from the past decade. (A “best of the decade” volume of Strange Horizons content would be phenomenal.) In those archives are a gaggle of stories from award-nominated authors who have just recently seen, or will soon be seeing, publication of their first novels and collections–N.K. Jemisin, Will McIntosh, Genevieve Valentine, Lavie Tidhar, Kameron Hurley, Amal El-Mohtar, Saladin Ahmed, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Theodora Goss are just names off the top of my head–as well as now-established vets like Elizabeth Bear, Jay Lake, John Scalzi, and Justine Larbalestier. Writers of such quality would have achieved success without Strange Horizons, of course; but there’s a lot to be said for the way that the openness of Strange Horizons can help writers simultaneously expand their range and their readership.

What’s been most pleasing about Strange Horizons in recent years is seeing how hard the publication has worked at improving itself. In particular, at bridging gaps without losing its identity. Among various improvements and additions in the past year, Genevieve Valentine’s film columns have been bridging the gap between surging film/media fandom and the more traditional, book-oriented; Mark Plummer has been bridging gaps between that traditional SF&F fandom and individuals who like some of the fiction but don’t necessarily self-identify as fans; Vandana Singh has been providing a look at real science not as the gee-whiz Golden Age savior of so much Western SF, but as a holistic component of the choices people worldwide make when we interact with the world, and each other. Strange Horizons also took a lead role in examining issues of diversity in genre reviewing early in this year, including a hard self-examination; an informal count of its subsequent reviews shows improvement, with a number of new contributors offering interesting perspectives on a noticeably more diverse distribution of works.

No publication is perfect, none get it right all the time. I do not enjoy every Strange Horizons story; I don’t find every review meaty enough; not every interview asks the tough questions that I wish were asked; not every poem reads to me as more than an over-determined set of words joined by indifferent grammar. But Strange Horizons seems better than most at being self-aware and working to improve. It is the publication that feels to me least satisfied with the status quo–its own and the larger field of narrative fantastika. It seems to have the largest vision, the widest aspirations: to serve as an example that diverse content from diverse hands leads not to “the problem of maintaining quality,” but rather goes hand in hand with increased quality; to catalyze an aesthetic that appreciates the consideration of individual nuance, complexity, and ambiguity, rather than easy morals and quick, rigid categorizations; to represent people living in a world that is indeed facing strange horizons, but to present the unknown as something that, while sometimes scary, can also be suggestive of openness and possibility. Change may not always be good, but it is inevitable, so let us make the best of it; let us make art of it.

In short, Strange Horizons is doing a lot right already; I’d like to see what it can achieve if this fund drive enables further improvement.