This week's Nuts & Bolts interviewee is Lawrence M. Schoen. "One of the world's foremost authorities on the Klingon language" (as his website proudly proclaims), he is also the author of numerous speculative short stories and poems, and two years ago he founded Paper Golem Press. I asked about Alembical (November 2008), an anthology of four novellas by Jay Lake, Bruce Taylor, James Van Pelt, and Ray Vukcevich, which Lawrence co-edited with Arthur Dorrance and published through Paper Golem. I especially recommend that anyone thinking of starting a small press read this interview.

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When I started the Series Business section, I decided it would be a good excuse to get caught up with Discworld. I was a huge Terry Pratchett fan about ten years ago, and then my obsession gradually ebbed (though I remain very fond of Pterry himself and recently contributed two squares to the Pratchgan, a project of the Ankh-Morpork Knitters Guild). I think Soul Music kind of left me cold, and after that I fell out of the habit of gobbling up each new Discworld book as soon as it came out. So in the name of writing interesting blog posts, I started from The Colour of Magic and began to work my way up.

I gradually ...Read More

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This week's Nuts & Bolts interviewee is Tobias S. Buckell, author of the Xenowealth books (previously covered in Series Business). I asked Tobias about the interstellar politics that shape the series as a whole and specifically influence the most recent Xenowealth novel, Sly Mongoose (Tor, August 2008).

Genreville: Where did the idea behind Sly Mongoose come from, and what attract

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Today I got in galleys of At Grave's End by Jeaniene Frost, which features a half-vampire heroine. As always, I am bewildered by this notion. Usually that locution would imply that one of one's parents is a vampire and the other is not. One of the notable features of death, however, is that it cuts off the possibility of breeding. (I hear that the latest Twilight book posits a miraculous vampire baby. This strikes me as absurd even in the context of vampire books, which tend to play fast and loose with both mythology and reality.) Without a vampire parent, how can one be "a ~vampyre~ (half)"?

This train of thought naturally led to thinking of all the ways that male vampires are, shall we say, not like other men. They can't create children, though...Read More

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A bit of administrivia first: I'm going on vacation from October 24 to November 7, and I'd love to have guest bloggers for those two weeks. If you're interested in writing guest posts for Genreville, or if you want to suggest good candidates for future Nuts & Bolts or Series Business posts, please leave a comment or send me an email.

This week's Nuts & Bolts interviewee is Betsy Mitchell, editor-in-chief of Random House's Del Rey imprint. As EIC, she oversees the imprint's acquisitions and handles many marketing decisions as well as working on individual books. Perhaps most famously, Mitchell decided to launch Naomi Novik's Temeraire series with ...Read More

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I haven't had much time for reading lately. In fact, I've barely had time for eating and sleeping. Nonetheless, last night found me awake at 3:45 a.m. so I could finish reading Elizabeth Bear's Whiskey and Water (Roc, July 2007), the second (or fourth) Promethean Age novel. I did this not only for you, dear readers--though I was quite aware of owing you a Series Business post, which of course means finding the time to actually read a series--but because these are rich, dense books, full of twisty politics and characters with myriad names, and putting one of them ...Read More

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Today I picked up Eldest (Knopf, August 2005) by Christopher Paolini, sequel to the famous Eragon (Knopf, August 2003). Our YA editor was mentioning that the third book, Brisingr, was about to come out, and she suggested I might like them. "You like dragons, right?" she said. "And made-up languages."

As it happens, ten years ago I was a linguistics major, had studied four foreign languages (French, Russian, Japanese, and Irish Gaelic, none of which I now remember much of beyond how to say "please take pity on this stupid American and speak English if you can"), and was a devoted follower of the ...Read More

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This week's Nuts & Bolts interviewee is Jason B. Sizemore, the publisher of the Apex Book Company. Apex specializes in science fiction, horror, and crossovers between the two. I asked Jason about I Remember the Future: The Award-Nominated Stories of Michael A. Burstein (November 2008, reviewed in this week's PW).

Genreville: When did you first encounter the idea behind I Remember the Future, and what got you interested in it?

Jason B. Sizemore: I'd just released our first non-anthology title (Unwelcome Bodies by

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I just finished editing the review of Laurell K. Hamilton's Swallowing Darkness, the seventh Merry Gentry book, where Merry (now Princess Meredith) reveals that her twin children have three fathers each. Genetically. Through magic.

Er.

Perhaps Ms. Hamilton has been reading back issues of Elf Only Inn. And now the image of Princess Meredith saying "LOL! IT HAS BEN A VARY BUSY WEEK!" has me cackling like a loon.

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Apologies for not posting this till now... I thought it had gone up on Monday like it was supposed to, but apparently I put the wrong date on it!

In addition to the SF/F/H reviews, I also handle PW's mass market reviews. Recently I've received not one but two mass market titles--The Pirate Bride by Shannon Drake (HQN, November 2008) and What a Pirate Desires by Michelle Beattie (Berkley Sensation, December 2008)--where a woman disguises herself as a man and becomes a pirate in order to seek revenge on someone who destroyed her family. Along the way she falls for a good-hearted fellow who finds her out and is not so much shocked as impressed.

I'm guessing these were written after the authors encountered the story of Grania ní Mhaille a.k.a. Granuaile a.ka. Grace O'Malley, the Irish "Pirate Queen" who was the terror ...Read More

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This weeks Nuts & Bolts interviewee is Irene Gallo, art director for Tor and Forge. I asked her about her work on Jay Lake's Escapement (Tor, June 2008), the sequel to Mainspring (Tor, June 2007).

Genreville: At what stage in the process did you encounter Escapement or the ideas behind it? What drew you to it?

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My husband is the source of many great ideas, and when I was musing about what to blog about today, he suggested a feature on Guilty Pleasures. I'm not a big fan of that phrase, because I'm not a big fan of feeling guilt or embarrassment around reading material. On the other hand, I've certainly had the experience of exclaiming "I can't believe how [cheesy/trite/predictable] this book is!" and then diving right back into reading it. The key to guilty pleasures is that they're pleasurable. They may be cheesy or trite or predictable, they may contain politics that make you want to grit your teeth, they may cover ground so well-worn that it's got potholes, they may barely bother to file the serial numbers off the source material, but they're still entertaining. I think the idea of entertainment as an aspect that's distinct from prose styling, tight plott...Read More

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