Genre Grapevine for October 2023
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Don't Overlook Small Acts of Goodness
I like to start each Genre Grapevine with a bit of "good news." A lot of the genre news I cover is by necessity not happy stuff, but it's also news people need to know about. So to offset that I aim to highlight some of the good things happening around us
But the last month, wow. It's like bad news mugged the entire damn world. And changes to social media platforms – thanks, Space Karen – have made it harder than ever to sift true news from disinformation.
As I finished work on this column, I was feeling pretty depressed because I had so much trouble finding enough good news for the column. So to decompress I took a walk around my neighborhood.
And yes, I know it's Halloween. I love Halloween. I never forget Halloween.
But loving Halloween and being swarmed by hundreds of kids in costumes are totally different things. As I walked I passed by kids wearing costumes inspired by countless fantasy and science fiction stories. The kids were smiling and excited and happy and racing from door to door shouting "Trick or treat!"
These kids believe in the stories and characters they've dressed up as. And tonight, nothing would stop them from enjoying life. Not their parents, oh gods, definitely not their parents. But also not all the ugliness going on in our world. Yes, there are so many wars going on, and hate and anger and killings when there shouldn't be any of that, and book bans and lies and so many of the other horribly nasty things people do to hurt each other.
But there are also kids out there right now enjoying a special night of the year. Sometimes small acts of goodness are what matter the most in our world. And goodness like this should remind us to never stop trying to create a better world for every child to grow up in.
Other Good News
Chuck Tingle is one of today's best philosophers: "get out there and prove love. create and build and fill the void with pieces of yourself that ONLY YOU can bring into this timeline and watch as they illuminate the darkness. you are infinitely rare so they have no choice but to sparkle and crackle and glow."
For more than a decade, NASA's Curiosity rover has been exploring Mars. The rover recently completed it's most challenging climb yet up Mount Sharp. In honor of the feat the Jet Propulsion Laboratory released an immersive video so everyone can see how far the rover has come and where it goes next. Mindblowing!
Worldcon
The 81st World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) was held from October 18 to 22 in Chengdu, China. I was unable to attend, but based on everything I heard the Worldcon was a milestone in the SF/F genre.
Yes, there were problems. File770 did a great job covering the convention, so if you want to learn about some of the logistical and hotel issues I suggest you check out this report (especially the translation of the con report from Hugo finalist Jiang Bo). Also worth noting per this different File770 article that the Chengdu Science Museum, custom-built to host this year’s Worldcon, evidently cost more than 1 billion yuan ($137 million USD). Which easily makes this the most expensive Worldcon of all time.
But there are always problems at each year's Worldcon. And the political and other issues related to this year's Worldcon have already been discussed at length in the genre.
Instead, what I'm taking away from this Worldcon are the images and videos of SF/F fans from around the world interacting with each other. The moving speeches from Chinese writers and fans who won Hugo Awards. The shared belief across all attendees that the science fiction and fantasy genre can change our world.
I hope this year's Worldcon is a big step toward a future where the World Science Fiction Convention actually represents the world.
Other Worldcon news:
Chinese writer Hai Ya won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette for his story "The Space-Time Painter." Watch this moving excerpt from his acceptance speech about chasing your dreams. "My dream and life are supposed to be two different worlds, but now in Chengdu my two worlds collide. My dream has shone into my real life."
Video of all six plus hours of the business meetings in Chengdu of the World Science Fiction Society, which runs Worldcon, have been uploaded to Youtube.
As of today, the Hugo Award voting statistics have not yet been released.
A fan's video tour of the convention (hat-tip File770)
Seattle won the vote to host the 2025 Worldcon, which will be held from August 13 to 17.
Nice video showcasing the Chengdu Science Museum where Worldcon was held.
Magazines Keep Struggling
As I reported last month, genre magazines are suffering from Amazon ending digital magazine subscriptions through its Kindle Newsstand platform.
As Sean Wallace recently shared, "for The Dark the loss of Amazon Newsstand effectively resulted in ten thousand dollars of revenue going poof, for the entire year. (Yes, that much!) I've made some cost-saving changes, but I don't hold much hope for the monies from KU to really make much of a difference. In fact, I imagine with every succeeding year the payments will increasingly crater, which amounts to a slow death by a thousand cuts. (Or sudden, who knows?)"
Wallace added that The Dark lost 600 subscribers when Amazon Newsstand ended, meaning those people didn't transfer their subscriptions to other platforms. Wallace also urged people to subscribe to The Dark.
Clarkesworld has also lost hundreds of subscribers in all this, and Uncanny Magazine likewise reports they "lost a great deal of its funding due to changes at Am*zon."
In addition, Interzone is also suffering, although I’m not sure how much this is related to Amazon’s changes. In an email sent to Interzone subscribers on October 13, editor and publisher Gareth Jelley said the magazine "will be switching to electronic publication -- from Interzone #296 onwards, issues of the magazine will be released as ebooks and no print edition will be produced. The reality now is that Interzone subscriber numbers have fallen too far, too quickly, and are not where they need to be to keep Interzone in print and simultaneously back onto a regular, bimonthly publication schedule; and for a zine like IZ, once it is a choice between print and frequency, it is a no-brainer. Anything else is unfair to contributors and frustrating for readers."
I hate that Interzone is ending their print edition – their last two issues are among the most beautiful genre magazines I've ever seen. But I also understand this move and prefer a world where an electronic edition of Interzone exists instead of a world without Interzone.
Jelly urged people to subscribe through the Interzone website, at Weightless Books, or to support their Patreon.
X-Twitter Goes XXX
Earlier this month Elon Musk instituted a major change to X-Twitter for anyone who shares linked articles or stories, as many writers do. This Slate article offers a great explanation of the change and why it likely happened:
"When someone posts a link to an external site, it no longer appears (on X/Twitter) in a card with a picture and a headline. Instead, it shows the image that goes with the webpage (if applicable) and, in small letters, the domain name. The change introduces confusion where none previously existed and carries no discernible user benefit. Some people are clicking on these photographic webpage links thinking that they're just regular photos to expand. Others might breeze past a tweet with a link in it, not realizing that a picture leads to an article at all. That's almost certainly Musk's primary goal with the switch: to discourage people from clicking on links so that they stay within X's walls, where they can drive up engagement numbers for Musk's flailing business. It doesn't matter that removing headlines from linked articles creates obvious opportunities for people to lie about or dramatize where a link will take them. More tweets will now fit on the screen, maybe. Again, the engagement potential is simply robust."
Because of this change, authors sharing links to their works on X-Twitter will likely find it harder than ever to use the platform to find readers.
Awards
Mame Bougouma Diene and Woppa Diallo jointly won the 2023 Caine Prize for African Writing for their story "A Soul of Small Places," published in Africa Risen.
Rebecca Campbell won the 2023 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.
Saud Ahmed and Sakina Hassan were the dual winners of the 2023 Salam Award for short fiction.
Other News and Info
Instead of standing up to the growing number of book bans across the country, last month Scholastic instituted a change to make it easier for schools to exclude books from their students. As NPR reports, "The educational company, which both publishes and distributes books, … said it was putting most of the titles dealing with race, gender and sexuality into their own collection, and allowing schools to decide whether to order it, as they would with any display." A number of young adult and children's authors, including Molly Ostertag, raised hell about this change. In response, Scholastic undid the change and apologized.
In response to Scholastic's apology, Daniel José Older said "Ok but 'we understand now that it was a mistake to segregate…' is one of the funniest sentences I've read in the year of our Lordicus 2023. Obvs it's also not at all funny it's an absolute disaster because 'we now understand' means someone had to make you - the largest children's pub in the world - understand and that someone, as always, was us - the people who spoke up. So much has changed / so little has changed."
Fantasy Magazine released their final issue. Here's the farewell editorial.
A month after winning a historic strike against Hollywood studios, the Writers Guild of America is being criticized by more than 300 of its film and TV writers for not taking a public stance against the Hamas attack against Israel on October 7. However, more than 300 different WGA, DGA, and SAG-AFTRA members have countersigned an anonymous letter against this campaign. This Vanity Fair article has complete details on all this.
Bogi Takács created a recommendation list of Palestinian literature to read, including fiction, poetry, anthologies, comics, and kidlit.
Suzan Palumbo and Marika Bailey edited the brand new Caribbean special issue of Strange Horizons. I urge everyone to begin their reading of the issue with Palumbo's editorial "Storytelling is Part of the Heart of the Caribbean Soul."
Palumbo also urged people to read the Palestinian special issue of Strange Horizons, originally published in March 2021.
The Washington Post published a short graphic novel about the life of Charles R. Saunders, author of numerous genre works including the Imaro series.
As Gabi Burton said, "Barnes and Noble dropped their 'Best YA Books of 2023' list and every. single. author is white. Y'all. I feel like a broken record at this point because this happens every day."
On a related note, Jessica V Aragon "spent the last year recording every english language fiction deal in Publisher's Marketplace, googling over 4000 authors, and this is what the current book deal landscape looks like." Spoiler: Despite all the talk of how publishing is diversifying, 70% of book deals in the last year were to white authors. And fantasy deals were 86% white, horror 87% white, and science fiction 77% white.
Michael R. Fletcher noticed that his Kindle Unlimited royalties have fallen compared to Amazon royalties for ebooks and paperbacks, with KU now making up only 23% of his monthly Amazon royalties compared to 41% for ebooks and 36% for paperbacks. I've heard other authors muttering about a similar pattern. If anyone else has noticed this with their own books, message me.
After destroying X-Twitter, Musk has evidently set his sights on a new prized asset of the world community: Wikipedia. As this headline in the Globe and Mail states, his "hate for Wikipedia reveals his true views on free speech." Read the entire column, which points out there's a big reason why autocrats would love to see Wikipedia destroyed. "If your plan is to control what people think by 'flooding the zone' with all kinds of theories and conspiracies, the one thing you can't abide is an independent arbiter of truth that transcends national boundaries."
Alec Robbins tells it like it is: "a billionaire taunting a struggling public service with the support it needs as if it's all just a big joke. like a king promising food to a starving village but only if their mayor agrees to dance nude in the town square first. evil in the most cartoonist way."
The mainstream media finally notices that the horror genre is experiencing a renaissance. Of course, readers and horror fans noticed this first, as evidenced by Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror edited by Jordan Peele and John Joseph Adams hitting the New York Times and other bestseller lists.
Last year Victoria Strauss wrote about payment issues at Cricket Media. She has now updated her original post with information on how one author was able to get paid by Cricket after THREE YEARS of waiting.
On Nov 10th, Ted Chiang and Dr Emily Bender are taking part in a virtual discussion titled "Wishful Thinking and AI" in Seattle. The session is a fundraiser for Clarion West. If you can't attend in person, virtual tickets are only $15.
Zhui Ning Chang is the new editor-in-chief of khōréō magazine, starting with issue 4.1 which comes out on March 15, 2024.
Camestros Felapton has a good overview of the recent in-fighting between Jon Del Arroz and Larry Correia. Grab your popcorn before reading.
This post by Mary Anne Mohanraj on Facebook is both a must-read and sadly correct about frustrations around the current publishing world. "As the barriers to putting up material and getting it (in theory) in front of readers have dropped away... there's been a massive influx of published material in the field (some of it now computer-generated, whee.) … and the social media companies have gotten serious about monetizing our lives here, so their algorithms have gotten very good at choking out anything that looks like you're trying to sell something." Mohanraj adds that "the proliferation of communications media (e-mail / social media platforms / texting / messenger / etc.) means that for a lot of us, we're just inundated ALL THE TIME, and the things we actually want to hear about disappear into the noise and the spam filters and the choked algorithms – the number of times I've heard people say, AFTER one of my Kickstarters has ended, that they had missed it completely, despite my posting about it EVERY SINGLE DAY for a month." Read the entire post.
Great points from Ray Nayler: "Many of the worst mistakes humans make come from two fallacies: 1) Thinking we are smarter than the people who came before us. 2) Thinking we are more important than the people who will come after us."
Derek Künsken wrote a good thread for writers on how to network at genre conventions.
Victoria Strauss covers how scammers are impersonating literary agents and publishing houses. A must-read for every author.
Sam J. Miller is living the 21st-century author life: "I just learned that my books have been banned in Florida public school libraries. And last week I found out they had been stolen to train an AI dataset that massive corporations are profiting off of."
Tom Gauld reveals the shocking truth about what goes on in libraries.
Alyssa Wong visually pointed out the difference for authors between "'Ugh, that character's your self-insert!' vs. my actual self-insert." Total agreement. Most readers have no clue what type of characters are in an author's mind when we insert ourselves into our stories.
Sauron's forthcoming memoir reveals the dark lord saying "I made mistakes, but I still believe that I delivered positive change for Middle Earth." Sauron also doesn't rule out a return to politics.
Opportunities
In response to the spread of book bans in the United States, Penguin Random House and We Need Diverse Books have launched a new writing award for students with a $10,000 college scholarship. The contest is open to current high school seniors in the U.S.A. who are planning to attend college. No deadline, but the contest is currently open and only accepts the first 1000 applications. Note this program also offers similar contests in spoken word, poetry, memoir and fiction, all of which are also open to applications and feature $10,000 scholarships.
Hexagon SF Magazine will be open for speculative fiction short story, novelette, and comic submissions from November 1 to 7. Details>>
Stelliform Press is open to queries from BIPOC authors for novellas, novels, short story collections, or short speculative non-fiction (such as memoir, graphic essays with speculative elements) through December 31. Details>>
khōréō magazine canceled their October submission period to give their editorial staff and first readers a break. They will reopen for submissions from January 15 to February 15, 2024. Details>>