These are novel times we’re living in!

Sorry, I couldn’t resist. But recent events are unprecedented, to be sure.

Fortunately, BSFW is flexible, able to go virtual with many of our events until the crisis has passed.

Therefore, due to concerns about the spread of COVID-19, BSFW organizers have decided we will not be holding in-person meetups until further notice. All meetups currently on the schedule will either be cancelled or moved online at the discretion of the organizers of each event.

That said, we’ll try to keep as many meetings on the calendar as we can. Obviously, we don’t have control over readings by our friends at KGB or NYRSF, and those much larger events are being suspended.

Writing is a solitary pursuit, and we continue in our mission of providing guidance and camaraderie for writers of speculative fiction as we continue on our individual paths to publication.

Look for messages from the organizers of meetings you are set to attend. Meetings will have to be capped at 10 attendees for a while, as most will have to take place over Google Hangouts, and anyone who’s used that platform knows how persnickety it can be.

Once COVID-19 has run its course and public meetings are no longer risky, we’ll be back to meetings as usual. This is, after all, our 10th anniversary year, and a celebration is in the works.

Stay tuned, keep writing, and we’ll see you online. We’re all in this together!

Brad,
Founder and Lead Organizer

     I only read books that I enjoy and only review books that I love. So, you can imagine how I feel about the Kingdom of Copper, the second  installment of S.A. Chakraborty's Daevabad trilogy from Harper Collins books.

     The book follows the continued adventures of our main characters Nari, the lost heir to Daevabad, the ancient Jinn seat of power, and Ali, the second son of the usurper emperor. It also follows a third character whose identity I will not divulge. Read it yourself for the explosive revelation. 
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      When the story begins, Nari has made a devil's bargain for the power to protect her people from reprisal, and Ali is on the run from his father's assassins. So already, you are hooked.

       I will give nothing else of the plot away. But it is one of those books that you pick up, and when you finally put it down, your eyes are twitching from muscle strain. It is dense with drama, the kind of book that demands at least 5 seasons on Netflix. You couldn't possibly fit all of it into a single movie, or even a trilogy and do it justice, which says a great deal about the power of the written word and S.A. Chakraborty's skill at world building and intuition for character.
 
     One would expect that a cast of characters as large as hers in a "foreign land" would be difficult to track. And yet they are not, because she makes every moment of page time count. Every character matters and there are no throwaway lines. 

     This is a story that a reader will enjoy and a writer should study. Just as every character matters, every detail binds you with its significance. Take this paragraph from an early chapter:

     The entire book is like this. Every. Detail. Matters. While I'm sure she has excellent editors over at Harper Collins,  I've also seen the unpublished, baby version of this book. So I can tell you this just happens to be a part of S.A. Chakraborty's skill set, prepackaged.

      If you are looking for a D&Desque experience, where the rules are clear and formulated independent of the characters, this story will break your expectations. The magic in the Daevabad trilogy serves as an active, weaponized metaphor for some of the central themes: the politics of heritage, obligation, and ethnic boundaries verses personal power. But if that's what you came for, The Kingdom of Copper sets the bar quite high. 

     In short, dear readers, hurry up and inhale the first two books. The final chapter of the Daevabad trilogy comes out June, 2020. 

Panelists: Malka Older, Sarah Smith, Cadwell Turnbull, Catherynne M. Valente, T.X. Watson (moderator)

Description (from program): With rising economic inequality and class struggle ever more visible in America, how are these issues being explored in SF/F? Is the pessimism of YA dystopias (from Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, published at the start of the Great Recession, to M.T. Anderson’s Landscape with Invisible Hand in 2017) emblematic of changed views of the American Dream? How do recent works differ from their 20th-century forebears (Nancy Kress’s Beggars in Spain), and how are they tackling the intersection of class and other identities?

Summary: The need to have a hero in a story can bias a story towards middle and high-class characters, and means that a large portion of the human experience is left out. It is also not faithful to reality, because actual history is more often shaped by a large group of people rather than a single hero. Many mundane acts of heroism are also systematically ignored.

Stories have to follow individual characters, but we can show them embedded in their organizations or communities and focus more on those dynamics. Stories need to be engaging, but that also means we can talk about difficult issues through “vampires and robots.”

​The stories that we consume affect the way that we see the world, for example, through hero worship. It’s a double-edged sword.

Highlights from panel discussion:

CV: As genres, science fiction and fantasy often have trouble dealing with class because the hero is often the one who has enough spare time to pursue a plot or mystery. People who are not part of the elite (e.g., the nobility or technical elite) don’t have time to figure out what’s going on, only the time to face things as they come. Fantasy especially has trouble with this because the nobility are the “movers and shakers of history”; at best you get the middle class (“fat hobbits”).

CT: A novel has to follow a person or small group to some climax, but actual history is seldom shaped by a few people. It’s more often shaped by a large group, including many people who don’t get named. Speculative fiction could do a lot to explore movements: how large groups of people work together to change society. The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin does a good job.

MO: We act as if we’re past monarchy, but a lot of things in our world came from the Victorian age. For example, breakfast buffets in hotels are an aristocratic tradition.

CV: We are still in a oligarchy; we are in a new gilded age. We have been “convinced as a culture to cheerlead capitalism, and specific players in capitalism.” Consider how much geek fandom is invested in the Avengers endgame. Disney doesn’t care about us! Media companies are making a ridiculous amount of money convincing us to consume their stuff as a fun hobby. Corporations are “making us complicit in our own oppression, and [making us] find it entertaining.”
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SS: It’s difficult to write a book about work, and about how politics works at a ground level. I think we can write more interesting novels if we can concentrate on how economic systems really work.

Question: How do you address the fundamental difficulty that stories have to be about individual people, not about systems?

MO: I’m fascinated by organizations, and group dynamics. Working as part of an organization, you can see yourself as a hero for a certain amount of time, but after a while you can’t keep tricking yourself. In stories, you need characters to identify with; I can’t be intrigued by abstractions. But we can show characters enmeshed in the organizations they’re working for.

In the modern world we consume a lot of content. If I don’t have a stack of good stories within easy reach I get nervous. Consuming this much affects how our brains mediate the world, and frames our experiences. We put the popular narratives as frames on everything we see. This can both be a good and bad thing.

We imagine people as heroes, because plots are built around individual heroes. We imagine romance where there isn’t any. What we think of as fundamental aspects of story are not fundamental - they’ve changed over history. Sometimes we’re right because others act on the same impulses, and so the story sense is a kind of intuition, but sometimes it’s false. We need to be critical of the narratives we’re consuming and imagining.

CV: We are motivated to take the stories we read and bring them into the real world. Consider the amount of worship that people direct towards Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and other billionaires. Trump is a “real world Tony Stark” (from Iron Man). We want to live in a world where someone comes to save the day. Elon Musk has been terrible for the class struggle; he was born with privilege upon privilege; his claimed inventions aren’t invented by him. But he bends narrative energy towards him, so people see him as a way to live in a different story.

CT: There’s a drive towards exceptionalism in stories: a super-competent hero saves the day. A challenge is to write normal people, facing something traumatic in their normal lives.

MO: Consider people who are heroes in your and other people’s lives. It’s hard to find these heroes in the news; they are unknown or disappear immediately; it’s hard to anchor them in your head. The things we are told are heroic are not as heroic or exciting as the things we ignore completely.
For example, pregnancy and childbirth are largely ignored in science fiction. But pregnancy is a heroic journey, and much more guaranteed to have pain than the journey of throwing a ring in the volcano. We think of it as mundane, unexciting, unremarkable. But this kind of heroism doesn’t have to be boring - think about the struggle to feed one’s family.

CV: Pregnancy shows up in horror stories. But childbirth and early childrearing are ignored, and used as a way to get rid of a woman character.

Breastfeeding is a class marker that has switched. It used to be that wealthy people used baby formula; breastfeeding was seen as vulgar and obscene. Now, it’s wealthy women who have the time to breastfeed, and the poor who use a formula because they have to go back to work.

Even women don’t write about these things because they think it’s not novel-worthy. Similarly, war is worthy and education is not. (Though, education and childrearing are talked about in AI stories.)

There is nothing in life that class does not permeate. Art has no obligation but to tell the truth, but if you are not involving class you are probably not telling the truth.

Question: We eat nutritious food (stories tackling important issues) and pizza (popular fiction). Where capitalism booms, are we doomed to pizza?

CT: Spinach pizza? If you create a beautiful thing, you can sneak in a lot of cool stuff and people will support it.

CV: This is where science fiction and fantasy shine. We can write about class struggle with vampires and robots. It’s not fun without vampires and robots, because we read about it in the newspaper every day. But because we write in genres, it goes down easier, in a way that people will remember more, because they were not expecting to get a lecture on class struggle.

MO: Fun is a highly underrated quality in literature. Writing about class, slavery, etc. doesn’t have to contradict fun; the writing and voice can be strong and enjoyable.

Q: Does human nature make utopia impossible?

CT: We need to get away from merit-based systems. The punishment for not winning the cherry-pie-eating contest should not be abject poverty. The bottom line should be nice and solid, so no one is falling through it.
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MO: There are many ways to organize society. We’ve designed society to incentivize certain ways of sucking. There are new societies we haven’t tried yet. We won’t know until we go out and try.

BSFW at Readercon

​I was at Readercon in Boston July 12-14. Readercon is a convention for “imaginative literature” (including science fiction, fantasy, and horror). I had an amazing time, and highly recommend it to anyone who reads or writes speculative fiction.

I'll give some of my general impressions in this post, and details about some of the talks and panels I went to in the next few posts.

Here is a list of online resources I learned about at Readercon: Ralan.com (list of markets), Odyssey writing workshop, Writing the other, Critters (online critique), Codex writers (online critique and support).

Impressions

I learned about Readercon from hanging out with the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers. This is the second science fiction/fantasy convention I’ve gone to. The first was WorldCon in London in 2014 (Loncon). I liked this a lot more because it was geared specifically towards the written word, and was a lot more intimate (with something like two or three hundred, rather than several thousand, people). I wish I had known about it ten years ago!
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It’s especially a great experience for an aspiring writer, because you get to connect with the community as well as leave with tools to get better, ideas to pursue, and books to read. Coming back from Readercon I feel newly motivated to write.

I got to talk to Neil Clarke, editor of Clarkesworld magazine, who was editor of the magazine for 13 years (while having a day job for the first 11 years) and goes through 1100 submissions a month; and Jeanne Cavelos, who went from astrophysicist to writer and spends a lot of time teaching writers through the Odyssey writing workshops.

I’ve found everyone really friendly, passionate, and dedicated to their work. I always imagined editors as hostile people in my head, but the opposite was true: they wouldn’t spend so much time on their job if they didn’t love their work, and they wanted to see writers succeed. Being rejected was an universal experience that people celebrated: authors talked about having a thousand rejection letters; editors expressed their delight at having someone succeed on the seventy-something try. Another universal was having to find the time and energy to write while having a job - whether it’s one that they’re equally invested in (I was cheered to see quite a few scientists!), a job just to make a living, or a job they would like to escape.

Many people talked about having been mentored in their career, and feeling compelled to pass it on. There was an acknowledgement of the difficulty of making it, as well as an infectious determination to persevere.

Most of the panels were very high-quality. A lot of panels I went to talk about the existing literature around a certain theme, and how one might go beyond the tropes and stereotypes. For example, the “real Middle Ages” are a lot more complex and varied than their homogeneous representation in medieval fantasy, and rather than young characters with ample time, what about lower-class characters or older characters (“graybeards beyond Gandalf”)? A convention is always very good for assembling a list of books to read and movies/shows to watch.

I also attended author interviews, and talks about an author’s works. It’s great to listen to their journey of becoming a writer, and their approach to it. There was also lots of information about writing workshops and programs, as well as local and online communities.

​Stay tuned for more details!

 
Tell us about the event or Meetup you host or are planning to host.
My regular hosting group is the Short Story Critique group that meets the first Sunday of every month. It's small but cozy, relaxed but intense. There are cats and afternoon sun. Unfortunately now, since I moved to Bay Ridge, it can be a bit of a shlep. I've been hosting it for a few years now. There are regulars and newbies, and a consistent high level of writing.

I would also like to host an On-the-Spot Submission group, for folks to submit their material with help from others, advice on venues, queries, first paragraphs, and troubleshooting on rejections. Soon!

I have also taught an Expert Meetup on how to read your own work, at Cons and also when you get that big book deal and tour with your book! I focus on choice of material, vocal skills, and pacing and dramatic presentation. 

How did you get involved with BSFW and which events do you attend? 
Like most, I googled speculative writing workshops and found BSFW on the Meetup site. Signed up when there was only one group, at Brad's place. I attend my own group (obviously), Expert meet-ups, writing rooms, On-the-Spot critiques when I'm on the spot with a project. Early on I attended the novel group but had to cut back because I didn't have the time to read everything.

What have you found most helpful about this writing group?
The critique and the support. The ability to bring a story back after a re-write. A place to jump start the creative juices (ew, that sounds icky). The tolerance for my weird sense of humor. 

What stories have most influenced your writing style?
Oh, well. Ellison. Pratchett. LeGuin. Bradbury. Sofer. Hiaasen. F. Brown. Link. Butler. So so many. Borges. Cortazar. Shelley. Jackson. McIntyre. Z. Henderson.  Lessing. 

How do you find the time to write?
I have the time because I work part-time. But it's a matter of willpower rather than time.

What are you working on now?
My novel Alien Death is getting a beta reading this month. Sending out some new stories. Thinking about and trying to re-write the first novel I wrote. It's a monster. Also a group story based on a YA story I wrote a while back. Maybe a mini-series based on It Happened in Red Hook.

Publications:
SFF: Daily Science Fiction, Diabolical Plots #35B and Issue #3, perihelionsf.com, Kaleidocast Seasons 1 & 2, Man.In.Fest Journal of Experimental Plays (Romania). Abandoned Towers online mag.
 
Other: Czech Plays: 7 New Works. tcgcircle.org interview with immigrant artists and international theatre artists. Various articles on Eastern European playwrights in Slavic and Eastern European Performance journal. 

If you could submit a story to your dream anthology what would it be about and who else would be in it?

Oh, folks from BSFW, Cat Valente, Liz Hand, Kelly Link. Modal, Teodora Goss, Barbara Krasnoff, Malka Older, N.K. Jemisin, Bo Bolander, Maria Dahvana Headley. Do you see a pattern??? Reprints from LeGuin, Moore, Butler, Cadigan, Finch, Johnson.