Call for Submissions at Turtleduck Press

Last week I told you about a call for submissions from Turtleduck Press, and promised to tell you a little more later. Well, later is today!

Turtleduck Press began almost three years ago, when several writers (including yours truly) decided to band together and pool our strengths to start a science fiction and fantasy press. We knew we wanted to operate like a traditional publisher in that everything we published had to be:

• approved by one or more members
• edited by an experienced editor (that would be me — editing is how I make my living)
• formatted and designed to look professional
• advertised on our website and everywhere else we could get the word out

…so we’d be publishing works of quality and also look professional — both good ways to attract (and keep!) readers.

Book Review: The Hair Wreath and Other Stories by Halli Villegas

This is a review of The Hair Wreath and Other Stories by Halli Villegas.

There’s a subgenre all about dissatisfied suburban couples, families breaking apart or struggling to hold together, the emptiness in people’s lives. Think Margaret Atwood, or in film, American Beauty.

Now imagine this subgenre with a touch of the fantastical. Sometimes it might feel more like horror, sometimes magic realism, sometimes pure fantasy, once in a while science fiction, other times straight-up realism.

That’s what it’s like reading this collection.

Genre-Bending: Just Barely Speculative Fiction

I’m fascinated by edge cases — genre-bending, cross-genre fiction, works that don’t fit neatly into categories. Today I’d like to talk about fiction that, for one reason or another, just barely qualifies as speculative fiction. Doesn’t mean it’s bad — often quite the opposite. It’s just doing something different.

First of all, I don’t mean literary fiction using genre tropes. That’s a whole ‘nother animal (one that I also enjoy). Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, for example, obviously uses the convention of time travel, but it doesn’t read like a genre work — it reads like women’s fiction or literary fiction, and it’s interested in the same sorts of ideas and themes. It’s using time travel to speak a non-genre language. Same for Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake or Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

What I’m interested in today is the reverse. What happens when a book is “speaking” speculative fiction, but it doesn’t use much or any technology that we don’t have today, or employ magic, or use any settings in imaginary worlds?

Author Spotlight: YA Writer Megan Crewe

In this Author Spotlight series, I’m talking about other writers you might not be familiar with, or you may have heard of but not read. The aim is to give you enough information to decide whether you might enjoy their work.

Today’s featured author is Megan Crewe. She’s a Canadian YA author who writes in a variety of speculative fiction subgenres, including (so far) a virus survival novel and a paranormal novel. If those descriptions make you think of heart-pounding thrillers with breakneck pacing, you’d be wrong — her stories are quieter, more character-oriented, but they build to page-turning finales. More after the jump…

Books: Exploring Science Fantasy

As a reader, I’m all over the spectrum of speculative fiction. I’ve been known to enjoy everything from hard science fiction, like Peter Watts‘s Blindsight, to epic fantasy, like George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. (I’ve written a pretty big variety of stuff, too. I also read and occasionally write outside speculative fiction, but that’s beyond the scope of this post.)

One thing that has always fascinated me is the way subgenres nudge up against one another, how the lines are drawn, where they grow fuzzy. Is a zombie story science fiction or horror? What about a time travel story or a superhero story? How about things like Star Wars, whose genre classification depends on whether you prioritize scientific accuracy over the presence of spaceships? Today I’m looking at one of my favourite areas of genre-bending — science fantasy and variations thereof.

Author Spotlight: China Mieville

Mieville's next book is out May 15, 2012.

In this Author Spotlight series, I’m talking about other writers you might not be familiar with, or you may have heard of but not read. The aim is to give you enough information to decide whether you might enjoy their work.

Today’s featured author is China Miéville. He’s a British speculative fiction writer whose novel Embassytown is up for a Hugo Award this year. That’s nothing new for him — almost all his novels have been nominated for, and often won, multiple genre awards. My thoughts below the cut…