Signal Boost #41 — Tansy Rayner Roberts (ed. Mother of Invention) & Sam Hawke (City of Lies)
https://media.blubrry.com/skiffyandfanty/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/archive.org/download/SandFSignalBoost41RobertsHawke/Sandf–SignalBoost41–RobertsHawke.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | Podcast Index | Email | TuneIn | Deezer | RSSIn today’s episode of Signal Boost, Elizabeth talks to Dr. Tansy Rayner Roberts, writer and editor extraordinaire, about 12th Planet Press’s robot creation anthology, Mother of Invention, which Tansy co-edited with Rivqa Rafael! The two discuss a bit of Tansy’s experience as an editor, how much she enjoyed going through the Kickstarter progress, what the anthology is about and how they gathered the stories (including one by Elizabeth! Yay Elizabeth!), and much more! Elizabeth stays down-under with an interview with Sam Hawke about her debut novel, City of Lies! They discuss how Sam’s love of food inspired a central premise of the story, what made her decide to focus on a sibling relationship and how that relationship was complicated by the physical limitations of one of them, the myth that women don’t write epic fantasy, and more! We hope you enjoy the episode!
My Superpower: Tansy Rayner Roberts
My Superpower is a regular guest column on the Skiffy and Fanty blog where authors and creators tell us about one weird skill, neat trick, highly specialized cybernetic upgrade, or other superpower they have, and how it helped (or hindered!) their creative process as they built their project. Today we welcome Tansy Rayner Roberts. My superpower is making extra work for my publisher. When your publisher is one of your best friends, and you’re invested in her success almost as much as your own career, it’s a very different relationship than when they are a distant, shiny corporation in a big city somewhere in the world. I’ve had quite a few publishers over the last 19 years as a professional author, and I am very attached to many of them, but Twelfth Planet Press feels like my baby almost as much as it belongs to its publisher, Alisa Krasnostein. I’ve been there from the beginning; watched her projects and aesthetic evolve. I was there as the idea for ‘hey what about monthly collections by female authors’ developed into a massive, sprawling 4 year project.
Signal Boost #1: George Sandison (2084) and Alexandra Pierce (Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler)
http://media.blubrry.com/skiffyandfanty/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/archive.org/download/SkiffyAndFantySignalBoost1GeorgeSandisonAndAlexandraPierce/SkiffyAndFanty–SignalBoost1–GeorgeSandisonAndAlexandraPierce.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | Podcast Index | Email | TuneIn | Deezer | RSSWelcome to the first edition of Signal Boost, a twice a month edition of the Skiffy and Fanty Show where we use our platform to promote books, anthologies, comic books, short films, zines, blogs, podcasts, artists, and whatever other cool stuff we think you should hear about. In our first edition George Sandison, managing editor of Unsung Stories, joins Jen to tell us about 2084, an upcoming Orwellian inspired anthology that is currently in its Kickstarter phase, and Alexandra Pierce, of Galactic Suburbia, joins Paul to tell us about Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler, an upcoming collection of letters and essays from Twelfth Planet Press, about the influence that Octavia Butler has had on the science fiction community, personally, professionally, and politically. We hope you enjoy the episode! Note: If you have iTunes and like this show, please give us a review on our iTunes page, or feel free to email us with your thoughts about the show! Here’s the episode (show notes are below):
My Superpower: Alisa Krasnostein
My Superpower is a regular guest column on the Skiffy and Fanty blog where authors and creators tell us about one weird skill, neat trick, highly specialized cybernetic upgrade, or other superpower they have, and how it helped (or hindered!) their creative process as they built their project. Today we welcome Alisa Krasnostein to talk about how Talking People Into Things relates to Kaleidoscope… I’m not sure I should actually tell you this but my superpower is talking people into getting involved in projects. I guess creative energy at the inception of a project is contagious. It’s definitely one of the best bits about publishing — the rush of coming up with a new project that you think can work, that you want to spend a year or two developing into something great and bouncing ideas off co-collaborators. That’s how we’re here— Julia and I—working on Kaleidoscope, an anthology of diverse contemporary YA fantasy. You see, I heard Julia Rios on a podcast recording of a panel at WisCon talking about YA dystopian fiction and how so much of it featured white, able bodied characters. And thinking about all the books I’d recently been reading, I realised how true that was and how little that made sense, really, that in post-apocalyptic worlds, only the white, able-bodied amongst us would survive some major world catastrophe. And I realised that I wanted to publish some fiction that was the opposite of that, to at least start to right that balance and provide some choice of something else for young adults to read. So I took this idea to Julia because I really wanted to work with her to make this project happen, since she’d prompted the idea, and, ok, I admit it. I used my superpower on her. And she said yes! And so here we are – this month we launched a crowdfunding campaign through the Australian platform Pozible to raise the funds to bring this anthology project to reality. The main characters in Kaleidoscope stories will be part of the QUILTBAG, neuro-diverse, disabled, from non-Western cultures, people of color, or in some other way not the typical straight, white, cis-gendered, able-bodied characters we see all over the place. Our focus is contemporary fantasy with protagonists from all sorts of backgrounds being the heroes of their own journeys. We’ve already acquired some fantastic stories from Sofia Samatar, Ken Liu, Vylar Kaftan, and Jim Hines and we’ll be opening the anthology to submissions when we raise $7k towards our fundraising goal. I can’t wait to bring this project to fruition. And um, use my superpower for good. To learn more about the project, check out the Kaleidoscope Pozible page! __________________ Alisa Krasnostein is editor and publisher at independent Twelfth Planet Press, a freshly minted creative publishing PhD student and recently retired environmental engineer. She is also part of the twice Hugo nominated Galactic Suburbia Podcast team. In 2011, she won the World Fantasy Award for her work at Twelfth Planet Press. She was the Executive Editor and founder of the review website Aussie Specfic in Focus! from 2004 to 2012. In her spare time she is a critic, reader, reviewer, podcaster, runner, environmentalist, knitter, quilter and puppy lover.
