Onyx Court 1 and 2 soon to be out as ebooks

I’ve been holding off on a whole lot of news while I waited for the new site to go live; now that it has, you should expect a number of things in quick succession. 🙂

Since Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie have reverted to me in the U.S., I’m putting out ebook editions of them through Book View Cafe. If you click on those title links, you’ll find you can pre-order the ebooks at a number of sites, including Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, and Kobo; or if you would prefer to buy from Book View Cafe, Barnes and Noble, or Waterstones, those will be available soon. Midnight will be out on the 17th (that is, next Tuesday), and Ashes the week after.

Hunt bugs, win a book!

Ladies! Gentlemen! Polite and helpful people of all types!

I need your assistance. Specifically, I need you to hunt bugs and errors on my shiny new website. I will bait you into doing this by offering your pick from my collection of author copies, and I’ll run it sort of like a raffle: for every bug or error you notify me of, you get one “ticket” to win a book. Send in seventeen corrections, get seventeen chances to win. If at least ten different people submit corrections, I’ll pick two winners; if at least twenty people, three winners; and so on. (It doesn’t matter whether you report an error somebody else already sent in; if it was there when you looked at the site, that’s good enough for me. Otherwise I have to do a lot of really annoying bookkeeping.)

Here’s the kinds of corrections I’m looking for:

1) Text errors. Misspellings, grammatical errors, wrong punctuation, etc. I proofread carefully, but there are a lot of pages on my site; odds are quite good that I’ve screwed up here and there.

2) Broken links. I scrubbed out a lot of dead links when I ported stuff over, but I probably missed some. Also, we’ve set up redirects for the old URLs, so when you click on a website-internal link in the middle of text, it should go to the correct new location — but if it doesn’t, I need to know about it.

3) Bad code. This could be anything from images displaying in the wrong place (like over text) to me forgetting to close a tag to munged escape character sequences. If the site displays badly on any particular platform, also let me know that, and I’ll pass it along to my site designer.

You can send these to me by email, via my contact form or in the comments. Please include a link to the page in question, and enough context for me to know where the error is — don’t just say “missing comma” or “broken link,” let me know where in the page that is. It will also help me if you separate the errors in your reply, just so I give you enough raffle tickets!

You have until the end of the month to send in your feedback; I’ll pick winners once I’m home again in early June. Thank you all in advance for your help!

Welcome to Swan Tower 3.0!

If you’ve visited my website in the last twenty-four hours, you may have noticed . . . a few changes.

screenshot of the Swan Tower front page

For the last month or so I’ve been deeply in the throes of a major, major redesign. As in, the entire thing now runs on WordPress — because I finally got convinced that it’s way more powerful and effective than I thought, provided you get somebody to tailor it to your needs (rather than just running with an off-the-shelf install). This beauty is the work of Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios, who has done a number of author sites; I recommend him wholeheartedly. It’s thanks to him that I not only have the usual stuff of blogs and pages and so forth, but a lovely setup that allows me to easily manage all kinds of material for books — buy buttons for different formats, auto-generated links to the rest of the series, cover galleries, “DVD extra”-type pages, and so forth. And photos! A whole gallery setup for photos!

Seriously, this thing is amazing. You guys get to see the pretty front end; me, I’m over here marveling at the dashboard, at how much easier maintenance is going to be in this iteration. So please, go admire it. Say nice things about Jeremiah’s work. There’s a lot to explore. 🙂

maybe it’s better not to be “a good person”

On the way home from Captain America: Civil War (which is quite good, and should have been titled Avengers: Civil War), we got to talking about the contrast between Arrow and Flash, and the problems I had with the latter. (I say “had” because I gave up on watching it partway into this season.)

It just occurred to me that I think part of my issue with that show is the same thing Slacktivist was talking about here, riffing off this post by Mychal Denzel Smith. Specifically, this bit, quoted from Smith:

When your self-conception is centered on the idea of your own goodness, it prevents you from hearing any critique of your ideology/behavior. Thinking of yourself as “good” allows you to justify harmful words and actions, since anything you do, in your mind, is “good.”

Flash feels like it has defined Barry Allen as A Good Person, and therefore it cannot address anything that might call his goodness into question — like, say, the extrajudicial prison he regularly throws criminals into, keeping them in solitary confinement for indefinite periods of time without benefit of trial or any other such legal process. He is A Good Person, therefore Basement Gitmo is good. By contrast, Arrow has not defined Oliver Queen as A Good Person; instead he’s been presented as a deeply flawed person trying to become good. Corollary: the show offers up frequent critiques of his ideology and behavior, and he changes in response to them. Not always, and not perfectly — one of the points season five has been making is that he still has a lot of problems. But that’s a story the show can tell, because it hasn’t taken its protagonist’s Goodness as a given.

I complained before that telling a story where ethics matter shouldn’t require you to be working in the grimdark mode — that Flash *could* have addressed the difficult question of how to handle superpowered criminals, while still being Arrow‘s perky younger brother. Now I wonder to what extent Smith’s quote points at the source of the problem: they could never tell stories where Barry grappled with ethics and questioned his own morality, because Barry Allen is A Good Person.

Signal-boosting for Judith Tarr

Author Judith Tarr is in dire straits. We’ve got this idiom in English about “losing the farm” — well, she is in actual danger of losing an actual farm. This would not only have dreadful consequences for her, it would leave all of her horses homeless: most of them too old or too untrained to be saleable. Right now she is scrambling to keep them fed for the rest of this month, let alone going forward.

There are a number of ways you can help her out, if you are so inclined.

1) Camp Lipizzan. Her horses are the “airs above ground” breed, the ones renowned for their beautiful high-school dressage movements. This is your chance to ride one, and even try out “horse yoga.”

2) Editing and writing mentorship. Judy’s a World Fantasy Award nominee; she knows her stuff. If you’re a writer, this may be of interest to you.

3) Patreon. She’s posting new fiction there.

4) Sponsor a horse. Full details are there, but you can help feed and water the horses, and get to know them in return.

Also, Judy has asked that people who have read her books post a review on Amazon, as that helps boost the visibility of her work and therefore increase her sales. I particularly recommend Writing Horses to the writers among you: if you’re ever going to have an equine in a story, this will help you do it right.

Many thanks to everyone who lends Judy a hand.

In other exciting news . . . .

Woke up this morning to find out that Sylvie Denis’ translation of A Natural History of Dragons is a finalist for the Prix Imaginales, an award given out at the Imaginales festival in Épinal, France. I’m rubbing shoulders with Sofia Samatar again; as you may recall, her novel A Stranger in Olondria won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel the year ANHoD was nominated, and now Une histoire naturelle des dragons is up against Un Ă©tranger en Olondre. Congratulations also to Cat Valente, whose first Fairyland book is listed in the Youth category!

I can’t remember whether I’ve mentioned this here or not, but: I’ll be at Imaginales this year, over what would be Memorial Day weekend in the U.S. and is just the last weekend in May for everybody else. Furthermore, since I’ll be going to all the trouble of crossing the continental U.S. and then the Atlantic Ocean, I’ll also be doing a signing at Forbidden Planet in London on June 2nd. In between those two things, it looks like I’ll have a couple of days to kill in Basel/Basle/Bâle, so if you know of interesting things to do there, do pass them along! It’ll be my very first time in Switzerland.

HOLY SHIT

. . . we just bought a house.

Well, properly speaking, we just had an offer accepted for a house. There are still lots of ways this could theoretically fall through (inspections turn up something bad, etc), but . . . we just offered an absurd amount of money for a house, and the seller accepted.

O_O

. . .

O_O O_O O_O

. . . because buying a house when you’re trying to finish novel revisions and write a novella and go on an international trip is a great idea.

Tales of Enchantment!

(I play too much Dragon Age. The word “enchantment” always comes out in Sandal’s voice in my head.)

I’m very pleased to announce “Tales of Enchantment,” a giveaway of more than 40 historical fantasy romances, plus a Kindle Fire to read them on. It’s organized by Patricia “Pooks” Burroughs, a fellow member of Book View Cafe, and features various other familiar BVC faces, like Irene Radford, Patricia Rice, and Sherwood Smith.

My own contribution to the bundle is an ebook of Midnight Never Come. Some titles swing the emphasis more toward “history,” some toward “fantasy,” and some toward “romance;” with more than forty books in the pile, there’s plenty to match all kinds of tastes.

The giveaway ends in seven days, so get your name in now! And note that if you share it and somebody else signs up from your share, you get extra chances to win. So spread the word!

PB-Giveaway-Brennan-Marie

if you can’t win, change the rules of the game

I don’t have the link, but my husband recently read me bits from an interview with or article by one of the screenwriters for the upcoming Doctor Strange movie, wherein the screenwriter referred to the character of the Ancient One as “Marvel’s Kobayashi Maru.” This is, of course, the character that recently got whitewashed by casting Tilda Swinton in the role; the screenwriter’s piece argued that it’s a situation in which there is no good solution. To wit:

1) The Ancient One is, right out of the gate, kind of a horrible racist stereotype. Mystical Asian master teaches white man the ways of magic! Yyyyyyeah, when that’s your starting point, you’re already in trouble.

2) Okay, say you don’t whitewash the role; you cast an Asian actor and just accept the fact that you’re going to perpetuate the Mystical Asian Master stereotype. The character is canonically Tibetan; you cast a Tibetan actor. Congratulations: you have just walked into a minefield, and its name is “Tibetan/Chinese politics.” China says “screw you, we’re not showing that film in this country,” and you lose out on one of the biggest markets in the entire world — a market which is pretty much necessary to make a film of this kind profitable.

3) Okay, okay, so no Tibetan actor. Cast a Chinese man instead! China’s happy! . . . at the cost of supporting China’s imperialist attitudes toward Tibet and erasing Tibetan identity.

Each one of us probably has an opinion as to which of those three options (whitewash the role and dilute the Asian stereotype; cast a Tibetan actor and eat the massive financial and political hit; cast a Chinese actor and erase Tibet) is the least of the available evils. But the fact remains that none of them are straight-up good options; up to that point, I agree with the screenwriter’s argument.

But I also look at that, and then think about the Kobayashi Maru scenario.

If you can’t win, then change the rules of the game.

For example: I’ve been told that in some versions of the Doctor Strange canon, the hero is Asian instead of white. I haven’t been able to track down a citation for that, but it doesn’t have to be previously true to be an option now; instead of whitewashing the Ancient One, racebend Doctor Strange himself. Then you may still have your Mystical Asian Master, but he’s not teaching a white man his secret ways, and you have a headlining superhero who’s a man of color. It doesn’t solve your Tibetan/Chinese political problem — plus you have to decide what ethnicity your Doctor Strange will be, which potentially carries its own complications — but it does help mitigate the problematic nature of the Ancient One himself, and his relationship with Doctor Strange.

Or my sister’s suggestion: cast a Tibetan actor as the Ancient One . . . and then re-film those scenes with a Chinese actor for the Chinese market. Sure, it’ll cost some money, but not nearly as much as losing out on the Chinese market. You’re still kind of complicit in China’s relations with Tibet, and you haven’t solved your “Asian master teaches a white man” problem (unless you combine this with the above), but it’s a potential compromise.

Or — and this is my preferred solution — get rid of the problem entirely, by getting rid of the Ancient One.

Jettison the inherently problematic baggage you inherited from previous versions of canon and come up with something better. Sure, the fanboys will wail and gnash their teeth — but whatever, they can suck it up. They already understand that there can be multiple different canons, sometimes with wildly divergent stories for how the hero got his powers; let this be another. Give Doctor Strange a different origin story, one that isn’t founded on a horrible racist stereotype. Change the rules of the game. Play something better.

I think the screenwriter did a good job of outlining the dimensions of the box they were stuck in. I just wish he and the director and the producer had realized that they didn’t have to be in the box — that they had the power to bust out of it entirely. It would have been better than the route they went.

(And Scarlett Johansson as Major Kusanagi? There is no goddamned excuse.)

The final count(down)

Actual number of html pages on my site: 351.

Assuming I didn’t miss any.

The good news is, I intend to remove some of the cruft, and doing that will reduce the number to 267. That’s more than 20% less! . . . but it’s still a lot. Doing the transfer is going to take bloody forever. I am sorely tempted to pay somebody to do it for me (this is a service my site designer offers), except that I know this is also my big chance to tidy everything up: change the organization, fix broken code, add information I left out before, remove stuff that’s out of date. So I plan on doing it myself, though I reserve the right to change my mind partway through.

I can do ten pages a day, right? At which point this will only take me . . . a month.

Yeah.

So yes, there is a new site on the way. Just don’t expect to see it any time soon.

(And for the record, the closest guesser was weareadevilcow on Twitter, with 341.)

Like those carnival games

I’m preparing to do a major overhaul of my site, and part of that process includes taking an inventory of the current site.

Which is rather large.

So let’s play a game! You guess how many pages there are on the site — individual .html files, not counting images and offsite links. Whoever comes closest to the real number will get a prize: their pick of my current inventory of author copies. (In the event of a tie, I’ll flip a coin or roll a die or whatever.)

Get yer guesses in!

Two more Dice Tales posts up

Because I was traveling last Monday, I neglected to link to that week’s Dice Tales post at Book View Cafe: Shared Delusions,” discussing the techniques gamers use to help everyone imagine the same thing (or at least a close enough facsimile thereof) while telling the story. This week’s post expands on one aspect of that and talks about “Costuming.”

Comment over there!

For the edification of the reader

The recent brouhahah over Stephen Fry saying asinine things about trigger warnings has given me an idea.

I’m going to add something to my website. I don’t know yet how I’ll arrange it in terms of code and presentation, but I’m going to provide content warnings for my fiction. Because I’ve had parents email me asking whether my book would be suitable for their kid (my inevitable answer: depends on the kid, and I don’t know yours, but the book contains XYZ), and readers asking whether my book contains a particular type of thing because they just don’t feel able to deal with that right now. So why not make that information publicly available? Yes, spoilers — but nobody will force you to read the content warnings. They’re there for the people who want them, and everybody else can go their merry way, exactly as they’re doing right now.

It will take me a while to write all this up (because I want to include my short fiction, not just my novels), and like I said, I need to figure out where I’ll put it on my site and how to code it (if you’re there to check the warnings for Work A, you won’t necessarily see all the warnings for Works B-Z). But apart from the labor involved, I see no reason not to provide this information. Also, I figure it would be good to ask: what kinds of things do you think it would help to see warnings for? I’m thinking major common ones, rather than trying to pin down every little thing — triggers can be very idiosyncratic. I’m also thinking of the kinds of things parents worry about, which aren’t so much triggering as inappropriate for kids at certain ages. So far I have:

  • Violence
    • Non-graphic violence
    • Graphic violence
    • Sexual violence
    • Murder
    • Major character death
  • Profanity
    • Mild profanity (i.e. “damn,” “hell,” etc)
    • Strong profanity (i.e. “fuck”)
  • Mild sexual content (i.e. reference to sex, but no direct depiction)
  • Drug use (not including tobacco, but including alcoholism)
  • Mental illness (PTSD, depression, etc)
  • Psychological abuse
  • Harm to children
  • Harm to animals

I’m not including things that haven’t actually shown up in my fiction, e.g. graphic sexual content [edit: also domestic abuse, torture, parental death], and obviously people’s boundaries for things like “non-graphic violence” vs. “graphic violence” differ. But if you can think of anything major I’ve left out, do let me know. (I’m also probably going to include special notes where necessary, e.g. “In Ashes Lie covers a period of plague in London, and gets quite grim and detailed about that event.” Because I don’t generally think I need to warn for illness, but I feel that’s one of the most horrific things I’ve ever written, and people might want to know it’s coming.)

Basically, I can go on providing this on a one-at-a-time basis — which requires people to do things like ask me “is there sexual violence in this book?,” thus possibly disclosing their own history in a way they would rather not do — or I can just put the info out there. I think the latter is the better way to go.

EDIT: good lord, self, have you written anything that doesn’t have non-graphic violence? (Answer: yes. But not at any length above novelette.)

All Around the Internet and the Western United States (plus other locations)

It’s been just two days since the release of In the Labyrinth of Drakes, and already I have stuff I should link to!

First of all, I’m up at Tor.com with a nonfiction post titled “Learning to See Through Photography”, where I talk about how I went from taking really crappy pictures of my camp friends to displaying selling prints at Borderlands.

I also set a land-speed record for time elapsed from drafting a post to it going live on someone else’s site: around midnight I started writing a requested post about dragons (riffing off the panel I was on this past FOGcon) and sent it off to my UK publicist at about 1:30 in the morning. By the time I went to bed at 3, it had already been posted to SFF World! Talk about quick turnaround . . . .

And I know I linked to this before, but I should mention again that “From the Editorial Page of the Falchester Weekly Review” went live on Tuesday. You don’t need to have read the Memoirs to understand the story, nor does it contain any real spoilers.

But! Speaking of Borderlands!

This Saturday, at 3 p.m., I will be doing a reading and signing. It will be lonely without Mary Robinette Kowal — come keep me company! 🙂 (And come see my pretty photos on the wall!) After that, I’m doing two other tour stops in the immediate future:

Monday, April 11th, at 7 p.m., I will be at the Powell’s Bookstore in Beaverton, in the Cedar Hills Crossing mall.

Tuesday, April 12th, also at 7 p.m., I will be at the University Bookstore in Seattle — in company with a certain artist. So if you want to get your books signed not only by me, but by Todd Lockwood, this is your chance to do both at once!

Further plans include Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego for their “birthday bash” on May 7th, the Bay Area Festival of Books in June, and in between those things, my Very First International (Non-Convention) Appearance at Les Imaginales in France. I don’t know whether any of my European readers will be able to make it there, but if so, I’d love to see you!

#5DaysOfFiction: THE DAY WE’VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR

Ladies and gentlemen and other courteous people, it’s finally here, the day you’ve been waiting for —

— the day Clockwork Phoenix 5 goes on sale!

What? That’s not the day you’ve been waiting for? But it has my short story “The Mirror-City”! Oh, wait, I know, short stories —

— today is the day you can read “From the Editorial Page of the Falchester Weekly Review”!

What? Not what you were thinking of, either? But it’s a Lady Trent short story! Surely you want to read her infamous dispute with Benjamin Talbot, about his —

— oh. Ohhhhhhhh.

You’ve been waiting for the publication of In the Labyrinth of Drakes.

Well, I have good news for you, ladies and gentlemen and other courteous people. Today it goes on sale in both the U.S. and the U.K. A part of me does not quite believe this; surely you had it in your hot little hands ages ago? I mean, I finished writing the thing more than a year ago — how is it possible that it hasn’t hit the street before now? But such is the way of the publishing world. It’s out at very long last, and I heartily encourage you all to run out and buy it from your nearest respectable bookseller.

With this, we conclude our Five Days of Fiction. But of course I have one more question for you all . . . and one more prize to give.

In honor of the day, the question is this: if you could spend the rest of your life studying one type of creature (be it mythical or real), what would you choose?

I’d probably go for faeries — which is a bit of a cheat, since that’s a flexible enough term that it encompasses a huge variety of creatures. But it’s the folklorist in me; I’d love to see the entities behind all those legends. A part of me wants to say dragons (if mythical) or cats (if real) . . . but I know the truth; I don’t deal well enough with the biological realities of an obligate carnivore to really want to follow them in person. On the page is good enough for me. 🙂 Faeries, though: that’s more of an anthropologist’s job. That, I can do. (Assuming I don’t accidentally step wrong and find a hundred years have vanished or I’ve turned into a tree.)

And yes: one lucky respondent will receive a signed copy of In the Labyrinth of Drakes. 🙂 Let us see what menagerie our guests have assembled for us!

(more…)

#5DaysOfFiction: Day Four

One day left until the release of In the Labyrinth of Drakes! And so we move into the fourth of Five Days of Fiction, celebrating the ten-year anniversary of my first novel being published.

Today we turn our thoughts to the worlds in which the stories take place. Your question, should you choose to answer it, is: which fictional world would you most want to live in? With the stipulation that you get to choose what type of person you’ll be in that world; you won’t be J. Random Starving Peasant. (Because let’s face it, most fictional worlds would really suck if we were J. Random Starving Peasant there.)

This might not make the top of my actual list of Fantasy Retirement Destinations, but I have a very deep fondness for the World of Two Moons, aka Abode, which is the setting for the Elfquest graphic novels. Being an elf there doesn’t guarantee you a happy life — you only get to live forever if nothing kills you first, and since the time period for the main story is pretty much the Neolithic, there are quite a lot of hazards that might get you — but even a nasty, brutish, and short life as an elf tends to be at least a century long, and in the meanwhile, you’re my favorite type of elf in pretty much any story, anywhere. I love the different tribes, their different perspectives on the world . . . all of it.

Which is why one lucky respondent will receive a copy of the first Elfquest graphic novel! Let us know your favorite world in the comments, and in the meanwhile, here’s the guest answers!

***

~ I want to live in Iain M. Banks’ Culture. A space-faring utopian society that actually works? Bring it on! — Jaine Fenn, author of the Hidden Empire series

~ Iain Banks’ Culture, because no one is a starving peasant there, unless they want to be. — Sean Williams, author of Hollowgirl

[editorial note: okay, we’ve got a little theme here . . .]

~ That’s a tough one. Overall, I think it’ll have to be the Discworld. — Juliet McKenna, author of The Tales of Einarinn and The Aldabreshin Compass

~ The Discworld. I’d live in Ankh-Morpork. Daughter of a minor merchant, teaching herself witchcraft and sometimes making a muddle, which she would then need to clean up while attracting as little attention as possible. — Alex Gordon, author of Jericho (coming out tomorrow!)

[editorial note: aaaaaaaand another theme . . .]

~ Middle Earth, if I could be an Elf. Amber, if I could be one of Oberon’s children. — Alma Alexander, author of Empress

~ Well, damn. Struggle as I might, I can’t find anywhere I’d rather live than Middle Earth. I am a cliche, apparently. — Chaz Brenchley, author of Bitter Waters

[editorial note: theme number three!]

~ I’m going with the standard boring answer of the Star Trek universe, because it’s basically a post-scarcity paradise for writer slackers like me. I wouldn’t be one of those high-achieving Starfleet assholes, either. I’d write books (or holodeck adventures or whatever) during the day, and replicate myself some world cuisine at night, and live easy. — Harry Connolly, author of The Great Way

~ Also impossible to answer, but let me pick Cat Valente’s Fairyland for the moment. — Pamela Dean, author of Owlswater (due out later this month!)

~ Pern. But only if I can impress a dragon and completely overhaul the rampant sexism. Which I will do. With my dragon.

Seriously, though. There are many worlds I might want to visit, but the idea of having a psychic link with another sentient being such that I would always have that shared, unconditional love? Yeah. Sign me up. — Alyc Helms, author of The Dragons of Heaven

~ Does any writer not name their own world? Probably a few. But I would take a manor overlooking Veridon any day of the week. — Tim Akers, author of The Pagan Night

~ I think it would give me great joy to live in one of Patricia McKillip’s nested worlds, the ones that are full of music and riddles, secret libraries and ancient manuscripts, ink-stains and books, books, books. — Leah Bobet, author of An Inheritance of Ashes

~ Harry Potter, as long as I could be a wizard. — John Pitts, author of Night Terrors (due out on April 11th!)

#5DaysOfFiction: Day Three

Day three of the Five Days of Fiction! We’re halfway through the celebration of ten years since the publication of my first novel. And In the Labyrinth of Drakes comes out in just two days!

Today’s question is: what’s a favorite book or series of yours? Note that I say a favorite, not the favorite; I couldn’t single out one above all others if you paid me. So just pick whichever one you most feel like squeeing about right now. 🙂

Me, I’ll go with Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, and especially the first book, The Game of Kings. (Not to be confused with A Game of Thrones.) It’s brilliant historical fantasy with amazing characters and complex plotting and holy crap her prose and THAT DUEL and I could keep raving but I won’t.

Instead, I will give away a copy! Tell me a favorite book or series of yours, and you may be the lucky respondent who wins a lovely trade paperback of The Game of Kings.

Let’s see what our guest bloggers had to say . . . .

***

~ Iain M Banks’ Culture novels. They’re beautifully realised, fun, and witty. — Jaine Fenn, author of the Hidden Empire series

~ The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell. Its impact reminded me of what fiction can be. Many authors say they are inspired by a bad book to think “I could do better than that.” The Sparrow gives me something to aspire to instead. — E. C. Ambrose, author of Elisha Barber

~ The Discworld books. If I had to pick, I’d go with the Watch books. But it’s a difficult choice. I love the Witches and Death books almost as much. — Alex Gordon, author of Jericho (coming out on Tuesday!)

~ God, so many, but if I have to pick just one, I would say that Tanith Lee’s The Silver-Metal Lover is perhaps one of my ‘just about perfect’ books. It hits pretty much everything I love: an unconventional romance, philosophical complexity presented in a stunningly clear and simple way, gorgeous prose, an ending that is ‘right’ for the story being told. Just… unf. I love that book. It destroys me every time I read it.

A close runner up would be Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. Everyone focuses on the gender pronoun thing, which is an interesting bit of culture-building, and yet that completely overlooks what I think of as the meaty brilliance of that book, which gives the reader the experience of a multi-perspective non-human consciousness in a way that the reader can still relate with and connect to. Fucking genius. She manages to balance multiple high-concept themes – colonialism/post-colonialsm, diffused consciousness, artificial consciousness, gender identity, sub-altern identity – without skimping on any of them, and unlike a lot of high concept books that can be plodding, she does it via a ripping action tale with some really fun ‘tagonists. — Alyc Helms, author of The Dragons of Heaven

~ The Long Price Quartet, by Daniel Abraham — Tim Akers, author of The Pagan Night

~ That’s tough, but I have to go with Lord of the Rings, which changed my life when I was 10. It shifted my brain in ways I had never imagined. — John Pitts, author of Night Terrors (due out on April 11th!)

~ Ah, the impossible question. Sorry, I can never come up with an answer to that. I can offer you two excellent recent reads – Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho, and Down Station by Simon Morden. Both offer me things that I’ve loved in books ever since I started reading – vivid, believable characters and compelling narrative with twists and surprises. — Juliet McKenna, author of The Tales of Einarinn and The Aldabreshin Compass

~ There’s a level on which that changes from month to month, but the book that is my soul, the book that’s woven into my bones, is Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. I read it the first time when I was exceptionally young, and reread it about once a year; every time I open it, it feels like a wild, beautiful, terrible wind blowing in. — Leah Bobet, author of An Inheritance of Ashes

~ I’m not one for picking a single favorite above all others, but The Chronicles of Prydain and Red Harvest were pretty influential for me. — Harry Connolly, author of The Great Way

~ This is utterly impossible to answer, but I will just randomly say Jo Walton’s Thessaly books, because Plato’s Republic meets the real world is just such a rich concept and she does it with so much style, grace, humor, and pure weirdness. — Pamela Dean, author of Owlswater (due out later this month!)

~ *rolls mental dice* A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K Le Guin, another fave from my youth. — Sean Williams, author of Hollowgirl

~ How about the whole Tolkien oeuvre? The Amber series? The Lyonesse series by Vance? And how about something like Guy Gavriel Kay’s “Tigana” which is not part of a series but which tears my heart out and gives it back into my hands still trembling like a bird?… — Alma Alexander, author of Empress

~ If “favourite” means “read most often over a lifetime”, that would be Tolkien again, LotR: how predictable is that? But actually now my favourite series for revisiting is Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin books, which I can read on a yearly basis. — Chaz Brenchley, author of Bitter Waters