From the PW review of Range of Ghosts (Elizabeth Bear. Tor, $25.99 (336p) ISBN 978-0-7653-2754-3)

“Bear launches a trilogy in a fantastic new world with this compelling tale…. Bear creates a vivid world where wizards must sacrifice their ability to procreate in order to control magic and the sky changes to reflect the gods of the land’s rulers. The strong setting and engaging characters will have readers eager for the second installment.”

11am, Saturday    Salon F     The Legacy of Thud and Blunder
Scott Lynch, Elizabeth Bear, Howard Andrew Jones, Violette Malan

2pm, Saturday     Salon H     The Shared Universe
Cindy Spencer Pape, Cat Rambo, Elizabeth Bear, Steve Buchheit, Tobias Buckell

3pm, Saturday     Salon E     The Writing Process
Dr. Phil Kaldon, Elizabeth Bear, DJ DeSmyter, Jim Hines, Anne Harris

4pm, Saturday     Salon G     Care and Feeding of the Writer
Elizabeth Bear, Jim Hines, Catherine Shaffer, Gretchen Ash, Robin Hobb

5pm, Saturday     Salon E     Mass Autograph Session
EVERYONE

8pm, Saturday     Athens      Reading
Elizabeth Bear, Scott Lynch

Now would be a fine time to note that SFF writer’s workshops Clarion, Clarion West, and Viable Paradise are all accepting applications!Also, the Alpha Workshop for young writers fundraiser is under way, and I have a small donation to the cause listed here.

Kirkus has given Range of Ghosts a starred review, which reads in part:

This lean, sinewy, visceral narrative, set forth in extraordinarily vivid prose full of telling detail, conveys a remarkable sense of time and place, where the characters belong to the landscape and whose personalities derive naturally from it. Though the book is not self-contained, Bear provides this opener with enough of a resolution to satisfy while whetting the appetite for more.

Gripping, perfectly balanced and highly recommended.

…I guess I did okay, then!

Available March 27th from Tor!

Being a review of sorts of a debut novel, Saladin Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon (Daw, February 7 2012)

As this is one of the other determinedly non-Western fantasies coming out this year, of course I had a vested interest in it.

This promising debut offers a glimpse of a dusty and wonderful fantasy city through the eyes of three engaging, unconventional protagonists.What I found particularly interesting about this book is that, although the setting leaves Fantasy-Europe behind to delve deep into Fantasy-Arabia–a welcome change–this book is structurally one of the most traditional adventure fantasies I have read in some time.

There is an old man, a ghul-hunter who has long since learned to take a pragmatic–perhaps even cynical–approach to life. His apprentice (and foil) is a passionate young ascetic, a dervish who wishes to learn the art of monster hunting. They are goaded into action by a shapeshifting warrior girl on a quest for revenge for her murdered family, killed by monstrous ghuls.

Deriving his inspiration from The Arabian Nights, Ahmed sends his three protagonists on an adventure that brings them into contention with gloating bandit princes, self-absorbed royalty, wisecracking alchemists, and a whole panoply of others. It’s fast-paced and good fun, though the structure wobbles a bit here and there (the ending seems slightly arbitrary), and I could have wished the villains had a bit more complexity throughout.

However, in terms of a wonderfully sketched-out fantasy world, a skittery adventure, and a joyous romp, this is not bad a-tall. The city and the culture breathe; the smells and tastes are lovingly evoked until the pungency of Ahmed’s world saturates the reader’s imagination.

The absolute truest thing I can say about this book is that it will make you awfully hungry.

Being a review of sorts of Caitlìn R. Kiernan’s The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (Penguin-Putnam, March 6 2012).

Kiernan has long explored themes of the malleability of identity, of the numinous in everyday life. In The Drowning Girl, she gives us modern-day Providence through the eyes of a young woman who suffers from schizophrenia: the ultimate unreliable narrator. This is a deeply beautiful book, deep and sensuous, treacherous and unpredictable, as full of undertows and currents as the title would suggest.

Her protagonist suffers visions. She suffers obsessions. She is an artist, and she becomes fixated on paintings, on stories, on the legends of drowned women in New England over the years. As she begins researching those legends–and legends, as well, of sirens and mermaids–she begins uncovering terrible patterns. Patterns that cost her her lover, her art, her stability, and perhaps her life.

But her brain is unreliable, and she–and we–can never trust those things she sees. This book represents an incredibly artful use of the unreliable narrator as an absolutely essential structural tool. It reminds me of what Charles de Lint did in Memory and Dream, but it’s my opinion that The Drowning Girl is the more successful novel.

I’m trying to find ways to talk about this book without giving away too many of its secrets, because it’s like a tide pool. There are myriad small mysteries here, and they all deserve the careful, leisurely attention of a reader who is willing to immerse herself in the story. Drowning is not just a thematic element here, but a structural one. As Kiernan’s protagonist drowns in information, in badly processed neural signals, the reader is swept along on sinister currents and, in the end, must make her own decisions about what really happened. It’s troubling and beautiful and it leaves the alert reader questioning her own perceptions and assumptions about the real world as much as anything in the text.

With The Drowning Girl, Kiernan has achieved a level of maturity and complexity as an artist that her earlier work merely hinted at in potential.

I can’t put too fine a point on it: This is a masterpiece. It deserves to be read in and out of genre for a long, long time.

For your convenience! The obligatory 2011 publications reference post!

Novels:
The Sea Thy Mistress (Tor)
Grail (Spectra)
The Tempering of Men (with Sarah Monette) (Tor)

Novellas:
The White City (Subterranean)

Novelettes:
“Gods of the Forge,” MIT Technology Review SF issue, October
“King Pole, Gallows Pole, Bottle Tree,” Naked City: New Tales of Urban Fantasy (Ellen Datlow ed., St. Martin’s)

Short Stories:
“Dolly,” Asimov’s, January
“Needles,” Blood and Other Cravings (Ellen Datlow ed., Tor)
“The Romance,” Supernatural Noir (Ellen Datlow ed., Dark Horse)
“The Leavings of the Wolf,” Apex, November

Essays & nonfiction:
“We’re Here To Save You,” Whedonistas (Lynne M. Thomas & Deborah Stanish, ed., Mad Norwegian Press)
“The City is the Forest: A Brief History of Urban Fantasy,” Realms of Fantasy, October

Web Originals:
Shadow Unit (with Emma Bull, Chelsea Polk, Leah Bobet, Will Shetterly, Holly Black, Sarah Monette, Amanda Downum, Stephen Shipman)

Podcasts:
SF Squeecast (With Paul Cornell, Lynne M. Thomas, Catherynne Valente, Seanan McGuire, and guests)

Moving forward to 2012, my dear Mr. Lynch and I will both be appearing at ConFusion in Troy, MI the 20th-22nd of January. Which is, yes, three weekends hence!

See some of you there.

“Five Autopsies” by Leah Bobet.

There was steel, and light.

The steel was in her hand, and where it cut, it demarcated: a line between correct and incorrect, evidence and conjecture; a line fanned out around two chilly breasts. The air was cool and sharp with bleach. The scalpel moved. Stiff skin split.

Madeline Frost peeled back the chest flap and said, “Fractures visible on ribs eight and nine.”

A good day, full of reprint news: not only will “Dolly,” my story from the January 2011 Asimov’s, be reprinted in Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best Science Fiction, but Podcastle has just purchased audio rights to two Abby Irene/New Amsterdam stories, “Wane” and “The Tricks of London.”

This is probably a good time to mention that Subterranean will be doing an e-collection of all the previously uncollected New Amsterdam stories, including “Almost True,” “The Tricks of London,” “Twilight,” and “Underground,” and either one or two new ones, depending on how many pages it takes me to dispatch my ideas.

I also may or may not have sold “Faster Gun,” the story frequently known as “John Henry Holiday Is Sick Of These Time Traveling Assholes,” to Tor.com, but I can’t actually tell you until they send me a contract. Ahem.

There may also be some good news on the horizon regarding a short story collection, but until paperwork is signed, that’s all I can tell you about that.

Diana Peterfreund, another of the contributors, has an awesome writeup of this anthology over on her blog. But I quote the list of authors:

The collection is edited by the excellent (and phenomenally enterprising) Paula Guran. Here is the list of authors: Jeanne Du Prau, William Sleator, Neal Shusterman, Carrie Ryan, Diana Peterfreund, Carrie Vaughn, Maria V. Snyder, Nisi Shawl, Kiera Cass, Jesse Karp, Seth Cadin, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Steve Berman, Amanda Downum, John Shirley, and Elizabeth Bear.

My story, “The Salt Sea and the Sky,” is set in the same universe as “Forge of the Gods” and “In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns.”

It will be out in March 2012, as will (apparently) all good things.

…you know you need one.