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Book Review: Iraq + 100: Stories from a Century After the Invasion

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Our world is dark and full of terrors. I won’t bother enumerating them here. Either you already know them or you’re already hiding in the peace and safety of your own personal new dark age. And anyway, it all will have changed utterly by the time we hit publish on this review. Bummed out? Now think about the people of Iraq, the cradle of civilization that we’re only the most recent society to have somehow decided would be better off blown to splinters. As exiled Iraqi artist Hassan Blasim reminds us in the introduction to Iraq + 100, the ordinary people of Iraq haven’t known peace in anyone’s lifetime, and that’s just for starters. But some people have gotten out, including some amazing artists, including the aforementioned Blasim, primarily a filmmaker, but also a writer and anthologist, who, from faraway Finland saw that if there was one thing his beleaguered countrymen (and the rest of us) needed these days, it’s some speculative fiction, some stories created under the assumption that Iraq (and the rest of us) will still be around in 100 years. And thus was born Iraq + 100, an anthology of fantastic, disturbing, wondrous and deeply historically grounded stories by authors and translators who now live all over the world but once called Iraq home.

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Guest Post: Tremontaine's Karen A. R. Lord shares her Philosophy of the Sword

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This blog post originally appeared at Serial Box, where you can find serialized fiction released in episodes week after week. Karen Lord is one of the writers on Tremontaine season 3. Tremontaine is the critically acclaimed prequel to Ellen Kushner’s beloved Riverside novels, which developed a cult following beginning with Swordspoint in 1987. The “Fantasy of Manners” focuses on decadent world building and interpersonal intrigue, and has been noted for its progressive expression of gender and sexuality. Team-written by some of today’s most exciting authors, Tremontaine season 3 is brought to you by Ellen Kushner, Joel Derfner, Karen Lord, Delia Sherman, Racheline Maltese, Paul Witcover, Tessa Gratton, and Liz Duffy Adams. The first episode is available for free at Serial Box and can be found here. Being a writer is like being a director with a crowd of characters demanding ‘So, what’s my motivation?’ Like real-life actors, they don’t always listen when you tell them your plans, which is why flexible plots and rewrites are a part of my process. It’s a process that works when I’m writing a book by myself, but a joint writing project like Tremontaine is a different beast. The world belongs to Ellen Kushner, the characters belong to Ellen and the full team of Tremontaine writers, and being on the same page is not a mere metaphor, but an absolute necessity. The Tremontaine writers are passionate about the world and the characters, and it’s been an exciting experience to work with them.

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Book Review: Valhalla by Ari Bach

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Valhalla, written by Ari Bach, is dark, gritty, dangerous, and subtly representative.  Bach unpacks his new world, layering loud violence, subtle queer identities, and a disturbing dystopian premise that promises an interesting alternative.  Valhalla pushes the boundaries of science fiction to make you question the lines drawn between dystopian governments, outside companies, and the people who make up the world those entities control, and sets up the foundation for a strong trilogy that centers around a queer female protagonist. Violet MacRae is our wonderfully violent narrator, living in the year 2230, when war is obsolete and most everyone knows their place.  With her propensity for violence and her less than spectacular intelligence, Violet doesn’t fit in, and doesn’t want to.  Faced with uncertainty about her immediate future, and ostracized from the only place in polite society that she had even a slight chance of fitting into, Violet returns to an empty home and is subsequently snatched up by Valhalla.  That is a secret military-esque organization that keeps the outer world in line with their unique methods, and there, Violet finds a real home.  But Valhalla and her new friends are in danger, and Violet finds her new skills are stretched to the limit as she defends her safe haven from genetically enhanced criminals.

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SEA Quest: Malaysia and Singaporean SFF anthologies

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Southeast Asia is a region rich in cultures and mythologies woven together by migration and trade routes. Its people are both indigenous and diasporic. The countries are born from syncretism, synthesis, assimilation and integration. Likewise, there have been colonizations, wars and occupations, with all these traumatic periods impacting the psychological, emotional and cultural landscape. Our fiction is a product of these shifting tides and collective psyches, joined by the sea and grounded by the land beneath our feet.  Our ideas are a mishmash of (often) conflicting identities and motives. We speak in English, the dominant tongue used by the British. Many also use Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch or French, also languages of the various colonizers who made their mark in many countries. These tongues collide with our own native and diasporic languages, producing identities that are indeed biracial, variant and syncretic.

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The Intersection: Day of the Dove

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“And so we drift in space… with only hatred and bloodshed aboard.” —Captain Kirk, “Day of the Dove,” Star Trek 1968 2017 has been a hard year to be a writer and not only because the Trump administration has been doing its best to remove all options for affordable, effective healthcare—something that freelancers depend upon entirely (and all professional fiction writers are, in fact, freelancers)—but also because with horrific event after horrific threat (Hello, North Korea), fiction writing begins to feel superfluous. Worse, if you’re like me and you enjoy writing stories about people trying to be their best selves in extreme situations like war, then you start to wonder if you’re contributing to the problem. They’ve been daunting, these thoughts. The only ray of light is the knowledge that I’m not the only one. In any case, I needed to stop thinking about the shooting in Las Vegas for a while. Star Trek, particularly original Trek, is comfort viewing. Interestingly enough, the episode I happened upon was one of the particularly fitting ones. It’s titled Day of the Dove.

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