virtual telepresences

Telepresence — WebEx or Zoom or the endlessness of Microsoft Teams work video-meetings — will never not make me think of William Gibson’s The Peripheral. We’re not quite there yet: no Wheelie Boys attending meetings in our place, with our projected faces superimposed on their screens. But right now it certainly feels as if we’re about to get there.

Which is all to say: like everyone else, I’ve been staying at home for the past nine weeks while the world slipped out of phase. Plague year, my coterie of writer-friends have taken to telling each other. This is a plague year: all bets are off.

I haven’t known how to write about good things, and I’m desperately bored of writing and reading about the pandemic and how it makes us all feel (let us simply leave it as: timelessness is a terrible thing to experience psychologically, and also timelessness is what we need to sit with right now). So I haven’t written newsletters. And now I am realizing that I … haven’t been telling anyone about the lovely things I am very grateful for, or how you all could stare at me via your computers (or your Wheelie Boy, if you are slightly deeper down the apocalypse curve than the rest of us. You do you.)

So. I will now tell you, with what feels like nearly unbearable awkwardness. Here we go.

NEBULAS, HUGOS, & THE COMPTON CROOK AWARD

I have the absolutely amazing and somewhat terrifying honor of reporting that A Memory Called Empire has been nominated for both the Nebula and the Hugo for Best Novel.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around the nominations. I’m so glad that this book has found an audience that wants to honor it in this way: these are the genre awards I grew up paying attention to. I’m so immensely proud of the book I wrote, and it is a profound joy that so many of you found it worth nominating.

I also was utterly delighted to learn that A Memory Called Empire has won the 2020 Compton Crook Award, which is given by the Baltimore Science Fiction Society for best first novel in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres. I will be the Compton Crook Guest of Honor at Balticon (the BSFS annual convention) for the next two years — which, because Balticon, like everything else, has gone virtual this year, will be 2021 and 2022.

Speaking of virtual Balticon (and virtual Nebulas), though…

MORE TELEPRESENCE! THIS TIME WITH PANELS!

I’m participating in both virtual Balticon and the virtual Nebula Conference in the next two weeks! If you’re signed up — or want to sign up — this is what you can see me talk about:

BALTICON - MAY 22-25 (ALL TIMES IN EASTERN)

• Friday May 22 — 9 PM - So You Want to Build a Galactic Empire (panel)

• Saturday May 23 — 12 PM - Kaffeeklatch (open discussion chat)

• Saturday May 23 — 7 PM - Science Fiction Has Always Been Political (panel)

• Sunday May 24 — 5 PM - Reading

• Monday May 25 — 1 PM - Turning the Starship of State: Government in Science Fiction (panel)

NEBULA AWARD CONFERENCE - MAY 29-31 (ALL TIMES IN PACIFIC)

• Friday May 29 — 2 PM - C is for Conlang (panel)

• Saturday May 30 — 8 AM - Urban Development: the evolution of cities in the 21st century and beyond (panel)

• Saturday May 30 — 5 PM - Nebulas Red Carpet (in which I wear a pretty dress)

• Saturday May 30 — 7 PM - Nebula Awards Ceremony

Award Eligibility 2018

That rough beast, its time come round again, slouches toward the Nebulas to be born — er. Hi. It’s apparently award season in SFF-land, and I am in the business of misquoting Eliot for fun and profit. Self-promotion is the order of the day. (My own ‘best of’ will show up sometime in December.) Awards season is like election season: breathless, continuous, and longer than you think. The Nebula Awards have just opened for nomination, and will be open through February 15; the Hugos will be along shortly, I’m sure. Nebula nominations are reserved for members of SFWA (at any level) — there’s a nice explainer here on the SFWA site — and the Hugos are open to anyone who buys a supporting membership in this year’s Worldcon. Most of you know this, but every so often I feel like we should be a little more transparent for those of us who don’t, or who are new.

I have two short stories which are eligible this year, both of which I am amazingly proud of. If I have to pick one, however, it is “The Hydraulic Emperor”, in Uncanny #20: about obsession, film collectors in space, sacrifice auctions, and weird alien nihilism. Also there’s the worst Grail quest pun ever.

The Hydraulic Emperor

Uncanny #20

I also have a piece of long flash in Fireside this year, called “Object-Oriented”, which is being reprinted in the Hope in This Timeline micro-anthology Fireside is putting out. It’s one of the few near-future pieces I’ve written, and one of the first that came out of my new work as a city planner with a real interest in hazards and disasters.

Object-Oriented

Fireside #53

(I’ve also been doing some more writing for Tor.com, most lately a piece on how post-disaster, humans are remarkably good at taking care of each other, contrary to popular belief: “What Really Happens After the Apocalypse”. You might want that as a chaser to “Object-Oriented”.)

I’m so very glad I got to have these two stories out in the world this year — next year, more, and also next year, a whole novel. But these two, I’m proud of.

In lieu of the traditional awards-eligibility post, this:

2017 has been an excellent year for me as a writer.

Nevertheless, this is not a post about the many things I have written which, if you happened to have liked them, you could nominate for Nebulas or Hugos or various other shiny things.

It’s not that I’m against awards-eligibility posts, ethically or aesthetically; I rather like them, both as a way of marking my own achievements for myself and for the sake of summarizing the work done in a year and sent out into the world – and I am completely unashamed about the self-promotion aspect, the outward-facing hey! I made stuff! Remember? Which is how the best of that sort of summary works: a moment of reification of the writer-self as an evaluatable object, a thing that can be spun and held up at angles to see how the light goes through.

The weird thing is that because 2017 has been an excellent year for me as a writer, I have … only one published piece of fiction in the year 2017. (I’m very fond of it – it’s called “Ruin Marble”, it’s about a possessed radio, fallen angels, the NYPL, and how to stop being an evil sorceress, and you can read it over here in Mithila Review 9. Critically, this story sank like a stone into a deep lake, without a ripple to mark its passing. So it goes. I like it; it’s in the world to read; that’s what matters.) Why only one published piece of fiction? Because even in the world of short fiction, there’s anywhere between a three- and nine-month delay between sale and publication – sometimes longer. So a story that came out in May 2017, like this one did, might have been sold in December 2016 … like this one was.

So the real question when a short fiction author who’d been averaging five to seven new stories a year suddenly drops to one story published in twelve months is jeez, what were they doing in the year previous to the year that the number dropped?

What did I do in 2016, essentially.

Here is a thing that I have learned: if, by chance, you spend 2016 visiting 11 countries for work, meeting the love of your life and getting engaged to her (thus beginning a pattern of bouncing back between Eastern time and Central European time in alternate two and six-week swings), attempting and failing to win at the academic job market, figuring out what you want to do if you’re not going to do academia and setting that project (city planning! Climate change mitigation!) in motion, being violently traumatized by the political implosion of your country, and finishing a novel?

You sure as hell are only going to write one short story in 2016. I mean. If you’re me.

And then in 2017 I spent the first half of it revising that novel, getting an agent, and having that agent help me sell it. (Which is why 2017 has been a great year for me as a writer.) I didn’t get the space or time to write short fiction again until June. (Sold the story I wrote in June – but guess what, it’s in the January-February issue of Uncanny.) And then another short story in September. (Sold that one too – but it’ll probably be in Fireside sometime around March.) Haven’t done much other short fiction – too busy revising the novel, now to editorial specifications.

People in the publishing industry talk a lot about the delay between the time when you finish your novel and the time when it’s published. Mine doesn’t come out til 2019. But I don’t think we often talk about the balance between producing short fiction and producing longer work, or about how short fiction publishing also has delays built in. I feel like I’ve had the most successful year of my life as a professional writer this year. And yet: just one story for you to look at!

It’s the balance that interests me, not the lack of possible award nominations. The tradeoffs between writing short and long, between projects that take years to come to fruition and projects that take months. I keep thinking about how this interacts with the necessity of keeping your name in the wind, as an author: you don’t’ want to vanish for a year, in terms of having people remember you exist. If I was just breaking in – if this was my first year, or if I’d had just one six-story year and then went dark – it’d be a lot easier for people to forget that I existed. Which of course is the fear. (I’m not worried now. I have a track record, and I have some very flattering anticipatory interest in the novel. But the fear is there, lurking.) As I’m shifting from the phase of ‘breaking in’ to the industry to ‘being a debut novelist’ – especially coming from being a short fiction person first and primarily – I am beginning to spend some significant time thinking about how to better control the ebbs and flows of publishing speed to produce a more linear narrative of authorial presence.

It’s a strange place to be in, this transition; a lot of people don’t come from short fiction first, so their breakthrough moment is that first novel. But for me, what I’m experiencing right now feels more like a state change: possibly from apprentice-writer to journeyman. There’s a whole new set of skills out here in novelist land. One of them is going to be time management on a years-long scale.