Novel of the week: The Strange Crimes of Little Africa by Chesya Burke

My new novel of the week is The Strange Crimes of Little Africa by Chesya Burke, an exciting mystery set in New York City during the Harlem Renaissance. The novel follows the adventures of anthropology student Jaz Idawell as she tries to solve a murder alongside her best friend Zora Neale Hurston.

Burke is an amazing writer, creating a 1920s Harlem which crackles with life and energy and pulls the reader into that famous time period. The novel's characters are equally engrossing, with Jaz quickly endearing herself to the reader, who can't help rooting for her as she battles corruption, discrimination, and revelations which threaten to tear apart both her family and society.

While The Strange Crimes of Little Africa is a historical mystery, Burke's writings are well known within the SF/F and horror communities, with her short story collection Let's Play White being one of the best first collections released by a new genre author in recent years. Even though this isn't a SF/F or horror novel, genre fans will likely enjoy Burke's mystery, as will any fan of mysteries and historical novels.

I also hope that Burke will write more stories featuring Jaz Idawell, who is a protagonist who would benefit from an entire series of novels.

Highly recommended.

Thank you, David G. Hartwell

My thoughts are with David G. Hartwell and his wife Kathryn Cramer. Last night Hartwell suffered severe head trauma, from which he passed away today.

As an editor Hartwell influenced my love of science fiction in many unseen ways. Without Hartwell the world would have a very different view of the works of Samuel R. Delany and Philip K. Dick and Gene Wolfe.

It's quite likely Delany's The Motion of Light in Water and Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun, both of which are among the best literary works of the entire 20th century, wouldn't exist without Hartwell.

On a personal level Hartwell was responsible for two of my most exciting moments as a SF author. The first was when he and Kathryn selected my story "The Ships Like Clouds, Risen by Their Rain " for one of their year's best anthologies.

The second was at a convention where Hartwell was the editor guest of honor. My short story collection Never Never Stories was released at the con and I was sitting at a table signing copies when Hartwell walked up with a friend. Hartwell smiled at me and told his friend, "I love this guy's stories."

I was floored that such a legendary editor would express such kindness about my writing.

Hartwell cared deeply about promoting and finding new authors. In fact, he once complained to me that not enough new authors where approaching him at a convention and pitching their stories.

In my mind, that kind of receptiveness to new authors is exactly what you'd want in an editor.

Thank you, David Hartwell. Thank you.

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)