Alex Shvartsman's Speculative Fiction

The Hook: Disciple of the Wind by Steve Bein

April 17, 2015

The Hook:

Mariko would never forget where she was when she heard the news.

Steve Bein writes:

There are those events in life that make such a deep impression that you’ll never forget where you were when they happened. Some are personal (my memory of the moment I learned about my first published story is nearly perfect, all the way down to how cloudy it was and how much sunlight was in the room), while some are so large that they define the experience of a generation.

It’s too bad that those generation-shaping moments are often tragic. Everyone of my parents’ generation can tell you exactly where they were when they heard about the assassination of JFK. Everyone of my generation can tell you where they were when the Challenger exploded. Everyone older than ten can tell you where they were on 9/11.

The first sentence of Disciple of the Wind was born out of a conversation I had with my brother the day after 9/11. I was living in Honolulu at the time, so because of the time difference, by the time I got out of bed all four planes had crashed. I’d gone to sleep in a nation at peace and I woke up in a nation under attack. My brother was living in Chicago, and heard all the events unfold one by one. There was a terrible aviation accident in Manhattan. No, not an accident; another plane went down. Then a third. Then a fourth. No one knew how many more there would be.

What my brother and I talked about was whose experience was worse? I don’t know that we ever came to an answer; the two experiences were so different. Reflecting on it now, I find it strange that I can remember the conversation so clearly, yet I can’t remember what conclusion we came to. But the fact that it stuck with me all these years is what inspired the opening pages of Disciple of the Wind.

No spoiler here: right from the first chapter, Tokyo is under assault. One explosion could have been an accident; the second one makes it a pattern. Mariko Oshiro, the only female detective in Tokyo’s top police unit, knows exactly who carried out the attack. She’s arrested him before: Jōko Daishi, leader of the Divine Wind. His cult has attempted terrorist attacks before; this time, Mariko failed to stop them.

She knows more about Jōko Daishi than any other cop in the city, but she’s never been able to watch her tongue. When she pisses off her commanding officer, she loses her badge. Now she faces an awful choice: her surest bet for stopping the Divine Wind is to abandon all the values she holds dear, join forces with a criminal syndicate, and become a killer herself.

From there I’ll just say things get a lot worse for her—and for Tokyo—before they get better. If you like police thrillers, I think this book is for you. If you like to see characters push the boundaries of their own morality, and venture into gray areas where you might be able to keep track of right and wrong, then this book is definitely for you.

Buy Disciple of the Wind on Amazon

About the author:

Steve Bein (pronounced “Bine”) is a philosopher, photographer, traveler, translator, martial artist, and award-winning author of science fiction and fantasy. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Interzone, Writers of the Future, and in international translation. His first novel, Daughter of the Sword, was met with critical acclaim, and his second novel, Year of the Demon, was named one of the top five fantasy novels of 2013 by Library Journal. Steve’s newest book, Disciple of the Wind is in stores now, and his new novella, Streaming Dawn, is available now for your e-reader. You can find his work at Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Audible.

Steve lives in Austin, Texas. Please keep up with him on Facebook at facebook/philosofiction and on Twitter @AllBeinMyself. Appearances, publishing news, photos, links, and more can all be found at http://www.philosofiction.com.

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Posted by Alex Shvartsman

Funny Podcasts

April 15, 2015

My humorous flash story “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Monsters” has been podcasted, rather brilliantly, at Far-Fetched Fables. You can listen to it there, or read the original at DSF.

And speaking of funny stories, there’s no more appropriate listening on April 15 than “Carla at the Off-Planet Tax Return Helpline” by Caroline M. Yoachim. It was originally published in UFO3, and is now live at Toasted Cake. Listen to it here.

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Posted by Alex Shvartsman

The Hook: Superposition by David Walton

April 10, 2015

The Hook:

I should have known better than to let him in. Brian Vanderhall showed up on my doorstep in the falling snow wearing flip-flops, track shorts, and an old MIT T-shirt, the breath steaming from his mouth in little white gusts. It would have saved me a lot of trouble if I had slammed the door in his face, never mind the cold. Instead, like a fool, I stepped aside.

David Walton writes:

Some stories start with a bang: an explosion, a death, a fire, or an arrest. Others start more subtly, perhaps even with an event the character himself doesn’t realize will be momentous. Either way, a story almost always begins with the moment everything changes for the main character. It’s the spark that kicks off all the action and danger in the rest of the book. The point when, whether the characters recognize it or not, their problems begin, and there’s no going back.

In Superposition, it’s the moment Jacob Kelley opens the door. Before an hour is past, the man he lets in will have demonstrated an unsettling new technology and fired a gun at Jacob’s wife. But although he doesn’t know it, it’s the moment he opens the door and steps aside that turns his life upside-down forever.

That’s why I think this first paragraph works as a hook, despite its relative simplicity. A man comes to the house; his friend lets him in. Not much to it, on the surface. But there are clues to the reader that something more sinister is afoot. For example, Vanderhall is badly dressed for the weather, as if he ran out into the snow with no time to throw on shoes or a coat. Why? Was he afraid? Of what? Also, the narrator says that he regrets letting him in (“like a fool, I stepped aside”), implying that there is trouble coming. There’s also the suggestion that Vanderhall has been trouble in the past (“I should have known better”).

These clues work together to give the reader a sense of unease, of unsolved mystery, of trouble to come. That trouble won’t take long to materialize–before the day is over, Vanderhall turns up dead and Jacob is arrested for his murder, and a relentless quantum intelligence attacks Jacob’s family. I hope you’ll consider picking up a copy, and reading what happens next!

Buy Superposition on Amazon

About the author:

David Walton is the author of the newly released novel Superposition, a quantum physics murder mystery with the same mind-bending, breathless action as films like Inception and Minority Report. His other works include the Philip K. Dick Award-winning Terminal Mind, the historical fantasy Quintessence (Tor, 2013) and its sequel, Quintessence Sky. You can read about his books and life at http://www.davidwaltonfiction.com/.

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Posted by Alex Shvartsman

UFO4 Slush Update

April 10, 2015

First, I’d like to thank our Kickstarter backers. UFO4 raised nearly $8500 during its campaign, enough to buy full slate of stories. interior illustration, and some exciting initiatives to be announced soon.

To date we’ve received nearly 200 submissions. Approximately 150 of them have already been responded to. We’re still considering a handful of stories from the first week of submissions and several have been advanced into the hold pile, to be decided on at the end of the submissions window. I post fairly regular updates on Twitter as to the status of the slush pile, so folks could query if the response has gone awry. Most authors should hear within 1-3 days.

If you haven’t submitted yet, please keep sending your stories! Don’t wait til the last minute. We always see a huge upswell of submissions in the last day and that’s fine, but consider this: if a story is pretty close but needs a rewrite, we’re more likely to ask for one if there’s time for the author to deliver. If we’re at the very end of the reading period and are on the fence about the story, there may not be enough time to ask for a rewrite. Of course, if a story truly wins us over, that won’t be an issue at all — but submitting earlier is good strategy in this case.

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Posted by Alex Shvartsman

UFO4 Kickstarter: Final Day

April 7, 2015

I’m very excited to report that UFO4 has already reached its initial funding goal of $8,000 and we’re now working toward our $10k stretch goal of a second, reprint anthology of humorous science fiction.

If you’re inclined to support this project, please visit the Kickstarter page and see if there are some rewards you might like?

I can also report that we’ve received a bit over 150 submissions to date and have responded to over half of them. I’m inclined to concentrate on the crowdfunding campaign over submissions today and tomorrow, but will catch up soon. Even at our “slow” times we tend to respond to an overwhelming majority of submissions in under a week, and often in 1-2 days. So send your stories — we won’t waste your time by sitting on the manuscripts for months before they’re even read!

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Posted by Alex Shvartsman

The Hook: The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu

April 6, 2015

The Hook:

A white bird hung still in the clear western sky and flapped its wings sporadically.

Perhaps it was a raptor that had left its nest on one of the soaring peaks of the Er-Mé Mountains a few miles away in search of prey. But this was not a good day for hunting—a raptor’s usual domain, this sun-parched section of the Porin Plains, had been taken over by people.

Thousands of spectators lined both sides of the wide road out of Zudi; they paid the bird no attention. They were here for the Imperial Procession.

They had gasped in awe as a fleet of giant Imperial airships passed overhead, shifting gracefully from one elegant formation to another. They had gawped in respectful silence as the heavy battle-carts rolled before them, thick bundles of ox sinew draping from the stone-throwing arms. They had praised the emperor’s foresight and generosity as his engineers sprayed the crowd with perfumed water from ice wagons, cool and refreshing in the hot sun and dusty air of northern Cocru. They had clapped and cheered the best dancers the six conquered Tiro states had to offer …

Ken Liu says:

The Grace of Kings is a silkpunk epic fantasy that re-imagines the rise of the Han Dynasty in a secondary world archipelago setting.

It’s the story of two unlikely friends, a bandit and a duke, who join together to overthrow tyranny only to find themselves on opposite sides of a deadly rivalry about how to construct a more just society.

The novel features a melding of classical Western epic narrative techniques with tropes taken from Chinese historical romances and wuxia fantasies. The “silkpunk” aesthetic employs many elements inspired by Chinese and East Asian traditions that I’ve always wanted to see in contemporary English fiction: silk-draped airships, soaring battle kites, honor-infused duels that are as much dance as warfare, magical tomes that describe our desires better than we know them ourselves, gods who regret the deeds done in their names, women who plot and fight alongside men, princesses and maids who form lifelong friendships, and, of course, sea beasts that bring about tsunamis and storms but also guide soldiers safely to shores.

The opening scene does two things: introducing the setting and establishing the narrative voice.

The Grace of Kings tells an epic-scaled story through individual characters that readers can empathize with and care about: a street urchin who rises to command tens of thousands under her banner, a ne’er-do-well who discovers his talent for crime as well as politics, a princess who navigates a maze of expectations to preserve the lives of her people, an actress who finds the parallels between kingship and theatre, an aristocratic scholar who is forced into inventing machines of death and plotting warfare … but one of the most important characters of them all is the setting.

The silkpunk aesthetic shares with steampunk a fascination with technology roads not taken, but what distinguishes it is a visual style inspired by Chinese block prints and an emphasis on materials primarily of historic significance to East Asia—silk, bamboo, ox sinew, paper, writing brushes—as well as other organic building materials available to seafaring peoples like coconut, whalebone, fish scales, coral, etc. The result is a technology vocabulary that feels more organic and more inspired by biomechanics. For instance, the bamboo-and-silk airships compress and expand their gasbags to change the amount of lift and are powered by feathered oars. When illuminated at night, they pulsate and move like jellyfish through an empyrean sea. Similarly, artificial limbs described in the book draw their inspiration from the “wooden ox” of Zhuge Liang in Romance of the Three Kingdoms, being constructed from intricate wooden mechanisms powered by flexible ox sinew.

The opening scene introduces the reader to this aesthetic gradually: in the following paragraphs, readers will discover that the approaching raptor is really a stringless battle kite, establishing the connection between the organic and the technological. As well, readers are given a preview of a few of the silkpunk wonders that will make more detailed appearance later on in the book.

The narrative voice of The Grace of Kings is also something where I had a lot of fun. It is a deliberate melding of narrative conventions taken from two very different traditions. There are wuxia-style flashback character introductions as well as Anglo-Saxon-style kennings, poems based on Tang Dynasty models as well as songs imitating Middle English lyrics, rhetorical devices taken from Greek and Latin epics as well as formal descriptions reminiscent of Ming Dynasty novels. The opening scene features an extended series of parallel sentences with repetitive structure to form a catalog, something familiar in old oral epics but not often seen in modern works. I wanted to cue the reader to expect something different from what they may be used to, something that should, after an initial period of adjustment, prove the right fit for the story I wanted to tell.

That’s the hook, and I hope you enjoy reading the rest of the novel.

Buy The Grace of Kings on Amazon

B&N – Powell’s – IndieBound – Simon & Schuster

Link to the novel excerpt at Tor.com

About the author:

Ken Liu is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

Besides Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, Saga Press will also publish a collection of his short stories, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, later in the year.

Visit his website or find him on Twitter or Facebook.

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Posted by Alex Shvartsman

How to Pay Your Writers panel at Kickstarter HQ

April 2, 2015

I recently participated on the live panel at Kickstarter HQ about paying writers for their work.

You can now watch the panel in its entirety, posted at the Kickstarter blog:

https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/talking-shop-how-to-pay-your-writers?ref=email

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Posted by Alex Shvartsman

The Hook: Loose Changeling by Andrea Stewart

April 1, 2015

The Hook:

Ever have your life turn upside down in the span of a few days? And not upside down in the just-had-a-baby or just-bought-a-house or even the my-brother-joined-the-circus-and-just-got-arrested-for-being-a-little-too-close-to-the-zebras sort of way.

I mean the sort of way where you find out you’re not actually human.

The mysteriously missing staple remover should have been my first clue that my week was about to get much, much worse. My mom liked to say that trouble didn’t just come in threes—it began with something small, almost unnoticeable, and then snowballed from there unless you did something to stop it. In her case, that meant drawing a circle on the ground to keep out unwanted spirits.

I just wasn’t that superstitious. Living in the real world does that to you.

I cradled my phone between shoulder and ear, swiveling from side to side in my cubicle, a packet of papers in my hand. “It’s not happening, Owen,” I said into the phone. I scanned my desk again. Stacks of papers sat in labeled piles, my color-coded calendar was pinned to one wall, and my scissors, staplers, and pens lay lined up by my computer, perfectly parallel to one another.

A.G. Stewart says:

Loose Changeling is a tongue-in-cheek urban fantasy, where the fairies are assholes and the two hundred year-old men come with two hundred years’ worth of baggage.

Nicole always thought she was regular-issue human…until she turns her husband’s mistress into a mouse. The next day, Kailen, Fae-for-hire, shows up on her doorstep and drops this bomb: she’s a Changeling, a Fae raised among mortals. Oh, and did he mention her existence is illegal? Now she’s on the run from Fae factions who want to kill her, while dealing with others who believe she can save the world. And there’s the pesky matter of her soon-to-be ex, without whom she can’t seem to do any magic at all…

The beginning above was actually the second beginning I wrote; during revisions, I scrapped the original beginning and replaced it with this one.

I wanted to establish a couple things in the first paragraph. Nicole addresses the reader directly for brief periods throughout. I didn’t want that to come out of left field. Second, I wanted a bit of her perky, humorous attitude to shine through, to show her personality and help the reader connect with her.

The second paragraph was my hook.

The first two paragraphs for me were about establishing tone, while at the same time leading into some conflict and setting up the premise of the book.

The third paragraph was an elaboration on the promise of conflict in the second paragraph. The missing staple remover is a lead-in to something much larger. It also gave me the chance to bring in Nicole’s mother, and to foreshadow her relationship with her family, something that becomes important much later on in the book.

In the last paragraph, we dive into the story. I wanted to show Nicole at work—the place she has always felt most comfortable—while her life was in the process of being overturned.

Another thing I wanted to establish in the opening was to set some sort of anchoring point, something I could later refer back to. One of the things I think that makes a story feel complete is the sense of having come full circle at the end. As such, I like the ending to contain some echo of the beginning, and the beginning to hold something that can later be echoed. It reminds the reader how far the character has come and what has changed. It’s like having a story about a character climbing a mountain. They begin at a gnarled oak tree at the base, and then look back at that oak tree once they’ve reached the top.

In the last paragraph, Nicole is on the phone with her husband, who is asking to get a dog. Her answer, as seen here, is an adamant “no.”

As for the ending?

Let’s just say that many things in Nicole’s life have changed, and this may be one of them—though not in the way you might expect!

Buy Loose Changeling on Amazon

About the author:

Andrea G. Stewart lives in Northern California and gardens year-round in her tiny backyard, an activity that allows for copious daydreams of distant lands and planets. Her fiction has appeared in Writers of the Future Volume 29, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Daily Science Fiction, Galaxy’s Edge, and Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. When she’s not writing, working her day job, or chasing chickens out of her vegetables, she hangs around the house with her trusty dog, her loud cat, and her endlessly patient husband. You can find out more about her urban fantasy series at http://www.changelingwars.com

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Posted by Alex Shvartsman

Live talk in Brooklyn tonight

March 31, 2015

I will be speaking in front of the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers association tonight, but non-members are able to attend as well (there is, however, a $5 entry fee and a two drink minimum).

The subject of the talk is humor in SF/F. How to write it, tricks for injecting some humor into one’s fiction, as well as a run-down of the short fiction markets that are most amenable to humorous and lighthearted stories.

The event will take place at Threes Brewing, 333 Douglass Street. Doors open at 6pm and the talk begins at 6:30pm. Come on by!

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Posted by Alex Shvartsman

2015 IGMS Reader Poll

March 27, 2015

I’ve been sitting on this news for about a week, and now that the latest issue of InterGalactic Medicine Show is out, I can finally brag. The following are the results of the IGMS Reader Poll this year:

1st place – “The Sound of Distant Thunder” by Mike Barretta
2nd place – “The Golem of Deneb Seven” by Alex Shvartsman
3rd place (tie) – “Until We Find Better Magic” by H.G. Parry
3rd place (tie) – “High-Tech Fairies and the Pandora Perplexity” by Alex Shvartsman

Last year, “Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma” came in 2nd in the poll, and I’m very excited to see an even better result this time around. I was told that I am the first author in the history of the poll to place two stories in the top 3!

The illustration for “High-Tech Fairies” by Andres Mossa won first place in the Interior Art category of the contest.

I’d say this is a good week 🙂

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Posted by Alex Shvartsman