litro | It Doesn't Have To Be Right...

June 13, 2015
by iansales 1 Comment

Retail therapy

There are many different forms of retail therapy. Some people buy shoes, some people buy clothes they wear once and then abandon in their wardrobe. I buy books, often hard-to-find secondhand books – and, yes, it may well take me years before I get around to reading them, but never mind. Here is the latest batch…

Two books about aircraft. I pick up copies of Wings of Fame when good condition ones appear on eBay. I now have all but four of its twenty-issue run. The Handley Page Victor was one of the most iconic-looking of the Cold War bombers, and there were quite a few that looked pretty iconic. I remember seeing a simulator at some RAF exhibition many years ago. Urban Structures for the Future, on the other hand, is architecture – futurist architecture from 1971, in fact. I saw it on eBay and couldn’t resist.

And from the air to beneath the sea. Project SEALAB is a 1966 junior book about the US Navy project to study living at the bottom of the sea, which ended in tragedy with SEALAB III. I wrote about it here. Diving for Science is, as the cover states, a history of deep submersibles, and Farming the Sea is about living, and farming of course, underwater.

Two more installments in a pair of Cinebook series, both translated from the French. The Septimus Wave follows on from an earlier book, The Yellow “M”. Châtelet Station, Destination Cassiopeia, however, is the first of a two-parter. They are volumes twenty and nine in their series respectively. I wrote about both of them here.

Sisters of The Revolution I backed on kickstarter, and though it took a while to appear it looks like it was worth the wait. It’s an anthology of femininst sf by women writers, and it contains a few favourites. Hearing Voices is an anthology of fiction reprinted from Litro magazine and includes my story of Space Age fashion and Apollo astronauts, ‘The Spaceman and the Moon Girl’. The Language of Power is the fourth – but not the last, one hopes – in Kirstein’s Steerswoman series. I noticed copies were getting a bit scarce so I thought it time to pick one up.

Despite the fancy cover design, Poseidon’s Wake is the final book of the Poseidon’s Children trilogy. The Lady from Zagreb is the tenth Bernie Gunther book from Philip Kerr, who’s now churning out novels like a machine. Gilead is a signed first edtion.

And while I’m at it – this, Gollancz, is not how you do a trilogy. Two books that match and then… seriously?

December 12, 2014
by iansales 4 Comments

2014 and me

This time last year I said 2013 hadn’t been a particularly good year, but this year has been worse. Admittedly, last year felt bad, but quite a lot of good stuff happened during it – including winning the BSFA Award. This year… well, the event of 2014 was Loncon 3, and I chose not to go to it (for a variety of reasons which felt right at the time). I did, however, attend the Eastercon in Glasgow, Edge-lit in Derby and Fantasycon in York. No trips abroad, sadly. I also went to Bloodstock Open Air festival, and it was a good one.

Only three of my stories saw print in 2014. ‘Waters of Lethe’ appeared in Perihelion SF in June; ‘The Spaceman and the Moon Girl’, my first ever sale to a literary magazine, appeared in Litro #137 in September; and ‘Far Voyager’ provided the title to the latest Postscripts anthology, #32#33 Far Voyager, in November. Another two stories were due to appear in an anthology this year, but its appearance has been delayed.

Speaking of delayed… I’d hoped to have Apollo Quartet 4 All That Outer Space Allows out in 2014. My initial hope was to have it ready for Loncon 3, but by July I was still busy doing research. And sort of feeling out the story and how I wanted to tackle it. Once I started writing it, and decided it was going to be a short novel rather than a novella, publishing it by the end of the year seemed unlikely. So it’s going to be a 2015 release and I’m aiming for the second half of January.

I’d used MPG Biddles to print the paperback editions of Apollo Quartet 1 Adrift on the Sea of Rains and 2 The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself, but they went bust in June 2013. So I had to use Amazon’s CreateSpace for book 3 Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above. And now that I’m running low on my stock of books 1 and 2 in paperback and would have to use CreateSpace to replenish… I decided it was a good opportunity to produce a second edition of each. New cover art, such that all four books will look like a set; and even some bonus material to up the page-count as CreateSpace can only put lettering on the spine for books of more than 100 pages. One advantage of this is that Amazon will print and carry its own stock, so I won’t make a loss every time I sell them a book. I’m also hoping shiny new editions will give sales of the books a kick in the pants – as too will the appearance of book 4 All That Outer Space Allows. As of 12 December 2014, sales of books 1,2 and 3 stand at 1,160, 540 and 255 respectively.

All of this had unintended consequences for another project I was working on: Aphrodite Terra, a mini-anthology of six stories about the planet Venus. Again, I’d planned to have it out for Loncon 3, but that didn’t happen. And given the amount of work I’ve ended up doing in the last quarter of this year, I’ve had to knock that into early 2015 too. I hope it’ll be worth the wait.

On the non-fiction front, I was interviewed at the beginning of the year by some Spanish bloggers – the Spanish-language version appears on Leticia Lara’s Fantástica Ficción here, and the English version is on Odo’s Sense of Wonder here. I was also interviewed on Confessions of a Book Geek for Sci-Fi November. I reviewed 23 books for SF Mistressworks and 3 books for Interzone. I also started a new reading project: postwar British women writers. Only two books read so far – by Storm Jameson and Susan Ertz – but it’s an informal, unstructured reading project so there’s no rush. I also contributed a pair of ‘Friday Fives’ to Pornokitsch: 5 Trips to the Moon in June and 5 Pieces of Soggy Sci-Fi Cinema in August.

2015 should prove… interesting. I’m determined it will be a more productive year than 2014 has been. Once All That Outer Space Allows and Aphrodite Terra are out, I plan to get started on a literary hard sf novel. I also have a stand-alone novella I’d like to write. And some short stories – I have several I started this year but never quite managed to finish. Toward the end of 2015, I’d like to gather together my space fiction stories and publish a short collection through Whippleshield Books. I also have another little project I’m considering tackling, a sort of pendant to All That Outer Space Allows. But we’ll see how everything goes.

September 14, 2014
by iansales Leave a comment

Future fashions…

The September issue of Litro Magazine, #137, is out now, so if you’re in London pick yourself up a copy. Each issue of Litro is themed, and this month’s theme is Future fashions. Hence my story in the issue, ‘The Spaceman and the Moon Girl’, which is about Apollo astronauts and space age fashion designers such as André Courrèges, Pierre Cardin and Emilio Pucci. There’s also fiction and poetry by Ivor W Hartmann, Tosin Coker, Ryan Van Winkle, Walé Oyéjidé and Efe Tokunbo, plus an article on future fashion in cinema by Claire Smith.

August 15, 2014
by iansales 1 Comment

Sales report

Loncon 3 is now in full swing. I am not there. After spending last weekend in a field in Derbyshire, drinking and watching a number of metal bands perform, I can’t say I’m especially bothered about missing the Worldcon (though I’m sorry I won’t have the chance to meet IRL a few visitors to the UK I know only from online). Bloodstock was good – I think I enjoyed the music more this year than last, even though initially I hadn’t been that keen on the line-up. Highlights were the sets by Obsidian Kingdom and Shining, and the crowd’s performance during Evil Scarecrow’s set. Other good stuff included Orphaned Land (twice), Rotting Christ, Winterfylleth, Old Corpse Road and Voices. The weather behaved – mostly. It hammered down on the Sunday, and everywhere got wet and muddy, but it cleared up by the evening. Security this year was much improved; the toilets were much worse. A good festival, nonetheless.

Meanwhile… these summer months so far have felt spectacularly unproductive, and there have been days when I’ve had trouble working up the enthusiasm to write, edit, or even get started on a book review… Which is not to say I’ve done nothing. It just feels like it. I’m assuming reviews count. I wrote a fair few of those during June and July. Four for SF Mistressworks, in fact: We Who Are About To…, Joanna Russ (here); Busy About the Tree of Life, Pamela Zoline (here); Worlds for the Grabbing, Brenda Pearce (here); and Judgment Night, CL Moore (here). A fifth went up this week – The Revolving Boy, Gertrude Friedberg (here) – and I have another two suitable books I’ve read but I’ve yet to start on the reviews – Aurora: Beyond Equality, edited by Vonda N McIntyre & Susan Janice Anderson; and Second Body, Sue Payer. I also reviewed Extreme Planets, edited by David Conyers, David Kernott & Jeff Harris, for Interzone (the anthology’s publishers really need to sort out its Amazon page); and I have another book sitting on this desk beside my laptop to review for them, which is, er, already late. (I’ll have it done by the end of the week, Jim. Honest.)

Whippleshield Books continues to quietly stumble along. Sales of Adrift on the Sea of Rains have just passed 1100, those of The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself are over 500, and Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above has to date managed a tardy 200-or-so units sold. I’m determined to get the final book of the Apollo Quartet, All That Outer Space Allows, out before the end of the year, although at present I can’t predict exactly when. (Which reminds me: I need to buy some more ISBNs.) Aphrodite Terra, however, should appear some time next month. (The contributors were paid on acceptance, so any delay is more annoying than anything else.)

Also, next month, I’ll have a story in Litro magazine. The issue has a “future fashion” theme, and my story, ‘The Spaceman and the Moon Girl’, is about astronauts and space age fashion designers. Sort of. Postscripts #32/33: Far Voyager should also be out some time this year, with my story providing its title. And later this year – no date as yet – Tickety Boo Press are publishing an anthology Space: Houston, We Have A Problem, which contains my story ‘Red Desert’.

ETA: I forgot to mention I contributed a couple of Friday Fives to Pornokitsch – one on sf novels about first missions to the Moon titled, with a great deal of imagination, ‘5 Trips to the Moon’; the other about sf movies set at the bottom of the ocean, ‘5 Pieces of Soggy Sci-Fi Cinema‘.