A very good New Year for writing

The new year is starting off great in terms of publications. In the last few weeks I've sold two novelettes, along with Chinese translation rights to two books.

• My science fiction novelette "Toppers" sold to Asimov's Science Fiction. This is my first dip into the time travel subgenre in what I believe is a totally unique vision of time travel.
• My historical fantasy/horror novelette "May Our Voices Sing Like Blood from Open Wounds" sold to Intergalactic Medicine Show. This is my first vampire story ever, although as above in a different manner than the norm.

I've also sold reprint and translation rights to both my Nebula Award nominated novella Sublimation Angels and my short story collection Never Never Stories to Douban Read. This Chinese ebook publisher has released translations of works by such authors as Ken Liu and Aliette de Bodard and it's exciting to join their ranks.

In other news I have a story slated to appear next month in Apex Magazine, have recently completed several other short stories and novelettes, and have written 30,000 words of a new young adult novel.

So far my writing muse is loving 2016.

Steven Universe as alternate history

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An alternate history map of the Earth from the Steven Universe episode "It Could've Been Great." Notice anything different about our planet?

Note: I'm moderating a panel on Steven Universe and The Legend of Korra at the ConFusion convention in Detroit, Jan. 21 to 24. Stop by the panel to hear more of my views on these groundbreaking series.

And yes, there are spoilers below. Minor spoilers, but if you haven't watched at least the first season of Steven Universe you should read no more.


The latest StevenBomb is over, with five new episodes of Steven Universe airing last week on Cartoon Network. I enjoyed all of the episodes, with one of them — "The Answer," featuring Garnet sharing how Ruby and Sapphire met — ranking among the best of an already great series.

As an added bonus, another of these new episodes confirmed something I've long suspected about Steven Universe: The show is an alternate history.

One of Steven Universe's strengths is that it melds the different speculative fiction genres together, mixing fantasy and science fiction in compelling, eye-opening ways. Despite this, during most of the show's first season it appears the Crystal Gems merely live in a slightly wackier version of our current world. In fact, when I first saw the show's initial two dozen or so episodes I believed the Gems were using their warp pads to jump to other strange planets, not to other places on Earth.

However, I soon learned that these "strange planets" the Crystal Gems were always warping to were actually different places on Earth, places which didn't usually correspond to life and environments as we know them. There were also hints in the first season of a much deeper backstory involving the thousands of years Garnet, Amethyst, Pearl, and Rose Quartz spent on Earth.

This history eventually emerges in the first season's second to last episode, "The Return," when Steven's father Greg Universe tells his son that not all gems are like the Crystal Gems. He says the gems invaded Earth and there was a rebellion and war led by Rose Quartz, with many gems and humans dying.

At this point I knew that Steven Universe didn't merely meld together SF and fantasy. The show also brought in the genre of alternate history, with historical events unfolding in severely different ways from what's written in our current history books.

The new Steven Universe episodes confirm this. In the episode "It Could've Been Great," the Crystal Gems visit the moon and show us a map of Earth. As you can see from the map above, there are a number of differences with the Earth as we know it.

Yes, the show's distinctive art style can account for some of these differences. But others are absolutely deliberate. Part of Africa is missing and appears to be connected to South America. There's a new and massive body of water in central Russia, in the middle of which sits the red dot of a Gem colony site.

Considering how Rebecca Sugar and the rest of the talented Steven Universe creators continually sneak in glimpses of future storylines — such as how they foreshadowed Garnet being a fusion gem — I have little doubt this alternate history of Earth will receive increased attention in the coming seasons.

Alternate history is a difficult genre to successfully pull off because different historical events can cause severe changes to stories set in the "present." If a story's present time is vastly different from the world a reader or viewer knows, you have to explain that backstory and history. Which turns into a massive infodump and/or seems silly to said reader or viewer.

Steven Universe avoided this by creating a world which appears similar to our own but whose vastly different history is only slowly being revealed. That's a brilliant way to reveal the startling different history and world creation of Steven Universe.

But brilliance is what we've come to expect from this amazing show and its creators.

Philip K. Dick was his own greatest creation

To this fan of science fiction, Philip K. Dick is a joy. To this writer and reader of SF literature, he's a frustration with occasional high points.

The joy comes because you can't touch SF these days without seeing PKD's fingerprints. Thanks to Hollywood's embrace of PKD's vision, his paranoia-ridden, schizophrenic view of society is everywhere. Perhaps PKD was a true visionary for seeing this turn in society. Perhaps he helped bring humanity to this view through his stories. Either way, that's more of an impact than any other SF author of the last 50 years.

But the frustration comes when you actually read PKD's stories and novels. He was capable of very good writing at times — The Man in the High Castle, one of his best novels, showcases the wordcraft he possessed when he took the time to rewrite and edit, as do other novels like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik — but far too many of his works drone with haste and self-indulgence.

Worse, his ability to create believable real-life characters was almost non-existent. PKD was an idea man, and that's seen in his writing. I suspect this is one reason he's been embraced by Hollywood — his ideas and stories allow others to graft onto them their own characterizations.

But while PKD's stories show a limited ability to understand his fellow humans, he did create one amazing character: Himself. His Exegesis reveals the great conflict which occurs when a person who understands science is confronted with a change within their own mind. PKD searches for any explanation — God, aliens, the religious — other than the mental breakdown he is actually experiencing.

PDK alluded to the truth of what is happening to him in his Exegesis, but in the end his storyteller soul embraced other explanations, stringing together coincidence and isolated facts until they became what he wished them to be.

PKD not only helped create our paranoid view of modern life, he documented within himself how we arrived at such a state. And to me that is his most tragically fascinating creation.

(Originally published in issue 16 of Journey Planet)

Novel of the week: Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard by Lawrence M. Schoen

There's magic in the best science fiction. An abiding sensawunda. An intellectual and emotional longing. A deeply human touch embracing the greater universe and the unending possibilities flowing around us.

Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard by Lawrence M. Schoen is one such science fiction novel. Set in a far future populated by anthropomorphic animals uplifted by humanity, Barsk is exciting, intellectually probing, and extremely moving. The novel is also a triumph of world creation, making you love the characters and their universe as if they were your own.

Despite the novel's galaxy-wide setting, the story focuses on a single world, the Barsk of the eponymous title which is the homeworld of two races of elephant-human hybrids. Despised by the rest of the species in the galactic alliance, these races of elephant-humans have walled themselves off on their world, content to live their lives according to their cultural beliefs and ideals.

One of these beliefs is that each elephant-human sets out on a personal journal shortly before their death to the elephant's graveyard. But something is stopping the recent dead from reaching their final resting place. One of the planet's historians, who also has the ability to speak with the dead, sets out to discover what is happening.

I have enjoyed Lawrence Schoen's fiction in recent years, but with Barsk he takes his storytelling to new heights, rivaling the top authors in the SF genre. In addition to the compelling story Schoen created, one of the best things about Barsk is how he weaves in interesting theories of cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics — both fields in which Schoen works — without letting the novel turn either preachy or boring. This depth takes the novel beyond a simple space opera tale into the realm of great genre works like Dune and The Left Hand of Darkness.

I can't remember the last time I finished a SF novel and immediately reread it. I did this with Barsk. This is a novel to cherish and urge others to read. This is a novel to show people who say the science fiction genre is dead and unable to create original stories.

Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard is highly recommended and will likely be on my shortlist of Hugo and Nebula nominees.

My schedule for Life, the Universe, and ConFusion

I'm a participating author at the ConFusion convention in Detroit from January 21 to 24. ConFusion is an excellent regional convention with a strong literary focus — and how can you not love a con whose theme is Life, the Universe, and ConFusion? This year's Guests of Honor are Alaya Dawn Johnson, Kentaro Toyama, and Gordon Smith. 

Here's my panelist schedule. Look for me and say hello.

Note that the following times are subject to change.

Justice for Ancillary Perspectives
Annalee Flower Horne (M), Jason Sanford, DongWon Song, Jenny Thurman, Natalie Luhrs
Friday January 22, 8 PM
Ann Leckie's now-complete trilogy of the Radch Empire has been critically and commercially praised for its exceptional blend of high concept space adventure and quiet contemplative look at identity and cultural constructs. Why has Leckie's work succeeded to the degree it has? How is she carrying on the work of Joanna Russ, Ursula LeGuin, and the feminist vanguard of the 1970s?

Podcasting Science Fiction and Fantasy
Michael K. Elliott (M), Jonah Sutton-Morse, Jason Sanford, Dave Robison, Jeannie Szarama
Saturday January 23, 11 AM
Talking about the popularity of podcasting in SFF fandom. What are the best podcasts out there?

The Rise of the Novella
Melissa F. Olson, Brian McClellan, Jason Sanford (M), Yanni Kuznia, Carl Engle-Laird
Saturday January 23, 3 PM
The last few years have seen a resurgence of shorter forms of fiction. Novelettes, novellas, and even short novels are doing better than they have in years, through self publishing and traditional publishers like Harper Impulse, Tor.com Publishing, and Subterranean Press. Is this resurgence a result of a digital evolution or declining attention spans? What does the future hold for fiction under 50,000 words.

Singularity for the Rest of Us
Wesley Chu, Jason Sanford, Tom Doyle (M), Andrea Phillips, Cameron McClure
Sunday January 24, 10 AM
Is post-humanism really as straight, white, and Western as it often seems? How can science fiction talk about post-body identities without diminishing or dismissing embodied identity and experience? This panel will discuss the stories out there that complicate the uploaded experience.

Are Steven Universe And Korra the Future?
Jason Sanford (M), Merrie Haskell, Carl Engle-Laird, Kimchi Zerbe, Navah Wolfe
Sunday January 24, 1 PM
Steven Universe is blazing a number of trails in animated SF&F, from its diverse characters and voice cast, to redefining issues of masculinity, and its emphasis on love, kindness and acceptance. The Legend of Korra has made similar waves with its clear nod to a same-sex relationship in the finale and the outright confirmation of it by the creators. Are Korra and Steven Universe opening a new chapter in what we can do with family-friendly SF&F media?