Want great #scifi and #fantasy for cheap? Check out #99centNovember

Happy Fall! You know what's falling besides leaves? The price of some great speculative fiction during a special promotion called #99centNovember.

It's Cyber Monday all month long! 

Such an honor that all the e-book formats of Things From Other Worlds are part of this celebration. I'm in very distinguished company, including Milo James Fowler, Daniel Ausema, James Garcia Jr., Simon Kewin, Michelle Ann King, TB Markinson, Tyrean Martinson, Rhonda Parrish, and Loni Townsend.

Get all the juicy details here.

D. Aviva Rothschild writes speculative fiction about The Beatles!

My respect for originality and the unusual is boundless, so my hat is definitely doffed to today's guest. D. Aviva Rothschild writes novels about John, Paul, George, and Ringo that go way beyond fan fiction.

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With Strings Attached, or The Big Pink Job, is a wholly original and problematic work of fantasy. By “wholly original,” I mean that it only superficially resembles other works of fantasy. If you know about TV Tropes, there's a trope about Standard Fantasy Settings. By those guidelines, Strings is almost 100% noncompliant. I have to admit, I was kind of startled to find that out.

Before the “problematic” part, the story in a nutshell: our four heroes awaken on another planet, 16 years younger and completely terrified. They're on the planet C'hou in Ketafa, a quasi-Victorian society where magic is genuine (and illegal), and where the gods returned 25 years ago, except they're fake. The reader knows the four were placed there as the subjects of a poorly set up alien undergraduate psychology project. After things go sour, the four end up across the sea in Baravada, a dying quasi-medieval anarchistic utopian dystopia (yes, really). Meanwhile, the aliens are kicked off their project for cheating and join up with a gamer in order to have access to the four. Ultimately, thanks to the aliens and the real gods, the four are empowered and charged with finding three pieces of a statue that have been scattered across other planets. This will remove a curse on Ketafa that prevents the real gods from seeing the continent. If the four don't do it, they don't go home. It's just too bad they detest Ketafa. And they're pacifists, so death and destruction are not options even though they've collectively been gifted with enough power to wipe out a city before breakfast. And not everyone wants them to succeed.

Straightforward and hopefully kind of interesting, right? Well... here's where the “problematic” part kicks in. The book falls, however unwillingly, under the rubric of fan fiction because the four protagonists are the Beatles. Well, the ex-Beatles, since it's set in 1980.

Did that suddenly negate your interest in the book? I know it does for a lot of people. And the fantasy aspect turns off a lot of Beatles fans who just aren't into that sort of thing. So, hello small (but devoted) niche audience.

I hate sounding defensive about Strings, because it's quite a decent book and I'm very proud of it. Over the 29 years it took me to write, I put a ton of research into getting their personalities as true to life as possible—no Hard Day's Night or Yellow Submarine Beatles for this writer, thank you! And they grow and change; the men at the end of the book are not the same as when they first arrived. If you know your Beatles history, there are subtle references scattered throughout, but they won't hit you over the head (no characters named Strawberry Fields or nonsense like that). On the fictional side, the two C'hovite societies and the secondary characters are as fully fleshed out as I could make them, with multiple sets of slang and some truly alien viewpoints. C'hou has a mysterious and tragic backstory that I'll be expanding in the two sequels (it's a planned trilogy). And Big Issues get explored: the nature of good and evil, the effects of power on people, addiction.

People have suggested that I change the characters. That would certainly make the book easier to sell. But I don't want to change them. I tried once, and failed. I'm just not interested in writing about four other people (just changing the names isn't enough) in this situation. The Beatles are smart, funny, profane, and emotional; they make excellent characters, and I'm committed to the trilogy as designed.

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Try before you buy! Half of With Strings Attached is posted on D. Aviva Rothschild's website, where you will also find purchase links for all formats.

You can also buy it as a Kindle ebook on Amazon or in print and as ebook on Lulu.

AJ Sikes on Noir in GODS OF CHICAGO

"Noir" is one of those terms that most of us understand vaguely, as a feeling we get when we read or see a darkly shadowed work showcasing the urban underbelly. But what is noir to an author who writes it? Please welcome AJ Sikes, who explains how he approached this genre in his new novel, Gods of Chicago. 

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Thank you, Anne, for hosting me today.

Gods of Chicago is a noir urban fantasy set in an alternate history 1929. Like all genres, noir has a set of tropes and characters who need to appear on the page for a particular story to fit readers’ expectations. In their introduction to The Best American Noir of the Century, James Ellroy and Otto Penzler famously (perhaps infamously) describe the genre in such a way that reading noir becomes tantamount to donning an executioner’s hood. There are no winners in noir fiction, they say. The late Roger Ebert had as much to say about filmic interpretations. My tough luck that I wanted to write a story that wouldn’t match any of these admittedly well-informed opinions.

It’s important to me that stories lead somewhere. Not necessarily to the fabled land of sequels and movie deals, but at least to a place that doesn’t leave ashes on the tongue. Noir storytelling involves scenes and events that are intentionally disturbing, but such instances don’t have to be the point of a story in order for it to be considered noir. A tale can be disturbing and still succeed at entertaining, possibly even evoking a sense of hope.

I wrote Gods of Chicago to tell a story that aims to entertain and disturb in equal measure. Bad things happen to good people. Innocence is treated with derision if it’s acknowledged at all. In that sense, the book does fit with Ebert’s description of film noir as “A [story] which at no time misleads you into thinking there is going to be a happy ending.” The storyscape is what you’d expect as well. Dark alleys, dim skies, back doors and hidden entrances, grimy city streets, and the lowest people on the social ladder kept well away from the upper crust. The people you meet have all seen enough to know there isn’t much reason to hope things will get better. But they still try. Whereas Ellroy, Penzler, and Ebert are convinced nobody but nobody thinks they’ll really win in noir, the characters in Gods of Chicago aren’t beaten yet, and they’re going to keep proving that to you long after the gun smoke clears.

Yes, everyone in the book is making a play and has a stake in the game, but that’s true of any character in any genre - perhaps no more so than in real life, where we all face obstacles to success and achievement on a daily basis. Fiction magnifies our little struggles for us, and that’s part of the joy of reading (and writing) for me. It’s enlivening to see characters faced with peril and doom only to overcome and triumph, to some extent, at the end. With Gods of Chicago, I aimed to capture the fatalism and futility that Ellroy and Penzler point up as hallmarks of the genre, but I also set out to dispel the myth that ‘all is lost’ in noir fiction. The skies and streets may be black with portent, but somewhere out there is a hint of light flickering, maybe even showing the way out.

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Gods of Chicago is available now as a Kindle ebook and Paperback.

Learn more about AJ Sikes on his website. Follow him on Twitter: @SikesAaron

Mary E. Lowd explains Otters in Space!

When I heard about Mary E. Lowd's Otters in Space series, I absolutely had to have her on my blog. I mean, come on, otters in space! Please! Tell us everything!

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Writing Furry Speculative Fiction

by Mary E. Lowd

My favorite books as a kid were all about talking animals.  As I got older, it got harder to find those sorts of books.  Sure, there's the occasional piece of science-fiction with animal-like aliens or off-beat literary novel from the point of view of an animal, but, mostly, talking animals are seen as kid-stuff in our culture.  So, when I set out to write a serious, hard science-fiction novel featuring talking otters as the main characters...  Well, I was breaking new ground as far as I knew, and I had to make up the rules as I went along.

Since then, I've learned that there's actually a name for the genre of fiction I was craving, and there's a whole community of readers, writers, and publishers who've put a lot of thought into how that genre works.  I was ecstatic when I discovered the furry genre.  Finally, I wasn't alone, writing about otters with spaceships.

There are a couple of different kinds of furry fiction.  Perhaps the most mainstream is 'the secret life of animals.'  These stories are usually set in our normal world -- talking animals co-exist with humans who are simply unaware of the dramatic tales unfolding around them.  (E.g. Watership Down by Richard Adams and Charlotte's Web by E.B. White.)  Animals in these stories are often only slightly anthropomorphic.  They can think and talk like humans, but they're otherwise normal animals.

The other extreme of furry fiction features animals who are so thoroughly anthropomorphized that the differences between species have become largely aesthetic, possibly metaphorical.  Foxes date bunnies; elk work in office buildings with mice.  Instead of co-existing with humans in the normal world, these anthropomorphic animals replace humans.  In this kind of fiction, the different animal species are merely different flavors, adding texture and color to characters in a simple short-hand.  (E.g. Maus by Art Spiegelman and Save the Day by D.J. Fahl.)

When writing speculative furry fiction, it's possible to fall into these extremes.  You could tell the story of the first colonists on Mars from the point of view of their pet cat.  Or, the first colonists on Mars could be cats with no explanation given for their furriness.  However, I love the stories that fall in-between, and, I like it best when those stories have an answer to the obvious question:  why can the animals talk?

This question has been explored so much by the furry writing community that some people feel it doesn't matter anymore, much like the question of faster than light travel in mainstream science-fiction.  How does the FTL drive work?  Who cares?  It just does.  However, the type of FTL drive in a sci-fi universe determines the sorts of stories that can be told there.  Similarly, the type of anthropomorphic animals determines a great deal about a sci-fi universe's history and culture.  So, it's worth knowing the tropes.

The oldest trope is parallel evolution.  See, those golden-furred, feline bipeds who live in family groups with one male figurehead where the females do all the work...  Those aren't lions.  They're aliens.  From a different planet.  They just happened to evolve to be really similar to lions.  (E.g. The Pride of Chanur by C.J. Cherryh.) This is a great trope.  It's easy to use and widely accepted.

Another answer to the question, 'why can the animals talk?', is that they were genetically uplifted by humans.  (E.g. Startide Rising and The Uplift War by David Brin)  This is my personal favorite.  Of course, it raises its own question of 'why?'  Were we designing soldiers, slaves, or simply companions?  Are they treated as equals?  If so, did they have to fight for their rights?  How long did that take?  Different answers to these questions lead to wildly different universes.  If we were designing soldiers, then the talking animals are probably larger, predatory species.   (E.g. Forests of the Night by S. Andrew Swann.)  If we were designing obedient slaves, they  might be dogs or a docile species like bunnies.  (E.g. Ship's Boy by Phil Geusz.)

A final possibility is that the animals actually are humans who have drastically modified themselves. (E.g. The Book of Lapism by Phil Geusz.)  In this case, the species of animals will be chosen by individual characters for personal reasons.  Individuals who choose to modify themselves so extremely are likely to be rich, eccentric, socially outcast, or part of a fringe subculture.

And, of course, all of these answers can be adapted easily to fantasy universes by substituting science with magic and scientists with wizards.

As you can see, explanations have been developed that will fit anthropomorphic animal characters into almost any piece of speculative fiction.  And, from fantasy to space opera to near future hard sci-fi, most speculative fiction can benefit from the color and texture added by a few talking animals.  Besides, they're just fun to read.

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You can learn more about Mary E. Lowd by visiting her website.

You can purchase the Otters in Space books from Fur Planet and Amazon.