Best First Opening Lines of the Year (With Conditions)

I thought I'd do something fun in gearing up for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) as well as the requisite "Best Of" lists that will populate this here bloggy-blog for the rest of the year, mostly. And that fun thing? Oh, you know, the 10 best first opening lines from novels or stories I've read this year - which means, of course, not all of these are from books or stories published in 2011, though most of them are. Are we having fun yet? Okay, great. Here goes:

10. "Interviewer: Can you introduce yourselves?
      "Alpha: We are third-generation intelligent agents of LogiComm Works, Inc., designed to calculate and settle agreements for our clients.
      "Beta: We are designed to filter out emotional noise factors that may prevent human agents from coming to an equitable resolution that maximizes efficiencies." - "Saving Face" by Shelly Li and Ken Liu (from Crossed Genres, January 2011)

9. "The tent is draped with strings of bare bulbs, with bits of mirror tied here and there to make it sparkle. (It doesn't look shabby until you've already paid.)" - Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti by Genevieve Valentine

8. "We sat on a hill. We watched the flames inside the balloons heat the fabric to neon colors. The children played Prediction." - Light Boxes by Shane Jones

7. "It began, in a way, with the midget hunchback tuk-tuk driver." - "Aphrodisia" by Lavie Tidhar (from Strange Horizons, August 2010)

6. "I'd never wanted to go to Earth until the doctor told me I couldn't, that my bones were too brittle." - "Long Enough and Just So Long" by Cat Rambo (from Lightspeed Magazine, Feb 2011)

5. "It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future." - The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe

4. "For years the air above the earth had begun sagging, suffused by a nameless, ageless eye of light." - There is No Year by Blake Butler

3. "In some places, time is a weak and occasional phenomenon. Unless someone claims time to pass, it might not, or does so only partly; events curl in on themselves to form spirals and circles." - "The Aunts" by Karin Tidbeck (from ODD? Anthology, October 2011)

2. "There is no book about me. Well, not yet. No matter." - "The Book of Phoenix: Excerpted from The Great Book" by Nnedi Okorafor (from Clarkesworld Magazine, March 2011)

1. "Morning light the sulphur color of the mine dumps seeps across Johannesburg's skyline and sears through my window. My own personal bat signal. Or a reminder that I really need to get curtains." - Zoo City by Lauren Beukes

Hugo Nominees: My Picks

Sadly, I won't be attending Renovation (Worldcon in Reno, NV, the king con of cons) this weekend so I will be unable to vote for the Hugo Awards - one of SF's most prestigious awards. Regardless, I intend to give you my picks in the categories where I'm familiar with the works or individuals nominated. You can find a full list of nominees here. I'll be attending next year's Worldcon in Chicago and I invite all of you to join in on the fun (and to read these books and magazines).

BEST NOVEL
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin. The award will probably go to Connie Willis for Blackout/All Clear, but I'd choose Kingdoms any day over these two. I also find it kind of unfair that Willis has two books nominated as one; Jemisin's second book in her Inheritance Trilogy too and that book, The Broken Kingdoms, is also wonderful.

BEST NOVELLA
"The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen's Window" by Rachel Swirsky. Ted Chiang is a worthy adversary, but I believe Swirsky will take this one home. One of the best stories I've read in several years.

BEST NOVELLETE
"The Jaguar House, in Shadow" by Aliette de Bodard. This is a tough category. I really like James Patrick Kelly's "Plus or Minus," and Allen M. Steele's "The Emperor of Mars." Honestly, it's almost a toss-up between these three, but de Bodard's stands out a little more above the crowd.

BEST SHORT STORY
"The Things" by Peter Watts. Despite this story being based off John Carpenter's The Thing, it is amazing. Alas, it is also very tough to choose in this category. Both Kij Johnson's "Ponies," and Mary Robinette Kowal's "For Want of a Nail" are fantastic too.

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION, LONG FORM
Inception, directed by Christopher Nolan. Despite its somewhat flawed conceit, this movie could've been a full-blown disaster and it wasn't. In fact, it was quite engaging. (Sidenote: I almost went with Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, but Scott didn't end up with Knives which was, to me, as infuriating as Duckie not ending up with Andie in Pretty in Pink. Come on, Knives is so cool!)

BEST EDITOR, SHORT FORM
John Joseph Adams. Lightspeed and Fantasy Magazines publish some of the best SF out there today.

BEST EDITOR, LONG FORM
Liz Gorinsky. I love Tor Books and Gorinsky is doing some amazing work there.

BEST SEMIPROZINE
Lightspeed Magazine. For the reasons stated in the Best Editor, Short Form section.

JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD FOR BEST NEW WRITER (not a Hugo)
Lauren Beukes. One helluva writer. I'm curious as to why Zoo City wasn't nominated for best novel.

Apologies to the best fanzines and fan writers and graphic stories, et cetera, but if I didn't pick from your category it's because I'm not familiar with the nominees. Hopefully, by next year, I will have rectified this ignorance. In the meantime, good luck to all the nominees!

Clarion +1: A Year of Writing

This time last year I was on an airplane, nervous with anticipation, for a 6-week writing "boot camp" in San Diego. I was on my way to the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Workshop. It is an intensive workshop taught by some of the best writers in the field. The instructors during my six weeks were Delia Sherman and Ellen Kushner, Dale Bailey, George RR Martin, Samuel R. Delany, Jeff and Ann Vandermeer. Their insights, as well as the insights of the seventeen other classmates (all of which I'm proud to call friends and who are some of the smartest writers you'll ever read), have inspired me to not only understand what it is I do better but, simply, to do it better. With that in mind (instead of waxing nostalgic in this post because, let's face it, I miss those Clarionites every day), I'd like to post a few of my accomplishments over the past year.

Since Clarion, I've had two short stories published in Aphelion Magazine, Prime Mincer Literary Journal, and one forthcoming from Digital Science Fiction in July. The story published in DSF is a revised Clarion submission story; and the story published in Prime Mincer was the story I submitted during the final week of Clarion.

Not including these three stories, I've completed 13 short stories - most of which are in the 4,500-5,500 word range, though some are longer, nearing novelette and novella status and some are flash fiction pieces, less than a thousand words. A few of these pieces have been submitted to various markets and are awating rejections/acceptances from editors and, though some have been trunked indefinitely, most are still in the revision process. Altogether, my total word count for short stories is approximately 47,500 words.

In November, I joined the National Novel Writing Month competition, completing half of a novel at 51,180 words. To be honest, I didn't finish it because I had decided to go into the competition without a game plan. It was actually a conscious choice - I wanted to see what it was like to write without knowing anything about the story or, at the very least, having the vaguest, roughest of outlines. The outline wasn't plot-centric; the character description was for only one charater, named Moo, and it went something like this: "Moo is a thief but he doesn't know it." Beyond that and a couple of names for worlds (this was a multi-dimensional galaxy spanning story), I had nothing.

What I've done the past few weeks, however, is returned to this novel to see if there was anything worth scraping. There is, in fact, a lot worth scraping, but I don't think the novel (or half the novel) works together. About two-thirds of the way through I break from the main characters to focus on a character that, though he was secondary to begin with, kept creeping up in the text to the point where 9,000 words was dedicated to telling his story, though his story had nothing to do with the main action. Reviewing the novel has shown me that there was a lot of interesting things going on that didn't have much to do with one another and, rather than try to tie it all up in some forced bow at the end, it seems the best way to handle the situation is to create two or three novellas out of it. This is exhilarating to me for a number of reasons. Chiefly, because it has been a long time since I've written anything over 10,000 words, and I've always enjoyed longer works (yes, I am obsessive over word count). I'm also excited because I really love the voices of several of the characters - Moo, Tok Willow, Nyanna, and Balador - and am looking forward to getting back into writing about them.

One of the other lessons learned from NaNoWriMo is that I need to plan if I'm going to attempt a novel. Between short stories, I've been jotting down notes for just such a task in a faded green notebook with a bird on a limb that I markered in black permanent marker. By the end of July, I'd like to seriously start working on it. (I've always read more novel-length works than short stories anyway and, in much of the feedback from editors and beta readers, I've been told there is enough material within some of my short fiction to extend into a novella or novel. Let's hope that's true.)

My sister Mandy and I also worked on a moleskins project together. This consisted of me writing a very short story (sometimes more than one in a single volume) in a moleskin notebook, leaving blank pages at certain intervals in the tale. Mandy would draw pictures to coincide with the themes or scenes from the story. I think we made eight of these. Several sold at Spencer Bell Legacy shows my band, Tin Tin Can, performed at.

Currently, I am working on four stories. Two of them are science fiction, a third is horror, and the fourth has elements of heroic fantasy though it isn't quite that. The first of science fiction pieces, tentatively titled "The Contra-Tuba's Soul," is coming along nicely though it, like a lot of my fiction, wants to be longer than I initially thought it would be; the other science fiction piece, tentatively titled "Sleeping Bird," is in its beginning stages, even though I had the idea for it the fifth week of Clarion. The horror piece is a story I wrote at Clarion, titled "Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, Aye," but I never submitted it for critiques because it really wasn't a story yet - it was a piddly thing of no significance, full of gratuitous sex and violence (instead, I wrote and submitted a terribly sentimental piece about an elderly lady taken to a sock hop by an alien and which caused Jeff Vandermeer, co-instructor that week, to exclaim, in full lambasting glory, "It's as cheesy as Beaches!"). After some thought, however, I've decided to retool the story because, despite most of the action, I'm fond of the narrative voice. The sort-of-heroic-fantasy story concerns a small island village and the soldiers who return home from a war. It is a melancholic piece. It's the kind of story where all of the elements fall into place and the world is so vividly realized for me that all I really have to do is type.

Looking toward the future, I'll be working on the above-mentioned novel from my bird-on-a-limb notebook, as well as piecing together - or pulling apart, rather - the two or three novellas from the NaNoWriMo half-novel. I also have several ideas - some of which have been floating around in my head since December (and one since 2005, eesh) - for a few other novels, so I'll begin writing notes for these soon. I also hope to continue writing short fiction: thankfully, every time I fear I'll run out of ideas for short fiction, another one inevitably comes along.

So. The final word count - it always comes down to the final word count, doesn't it? - for the first year post-Clarion is 98,680 words. I've had 3 acceptances, 4 currently pending, and 43 rejections. Before Clarion I wasn't serious about writing - I had written one and half novels when I was 19, five short stories in college, and two since graduating that were rejected from one literary magazine each and trunked. In fact, I'd only decided to get serious about writing shortly before being accepted to the workshop, starting off by writing something - anything - every day, no matter what. I've done that, almost without fail, for over a year now. But, since Clarion and my wonderful classmates' and instructors' techniques and insights, I do so with a better understanding of the craft and labor of writing. Thank you all.

Review: Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey

Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey (the pen name of the ubiquitous Daniel Abraham and George R.R. Martin's assistant, Ty Franck) is an engaging by-the-seat-of-your-pants space opera, replete with noir grit, excellently realized futurescapes, and "vomit zombies."

The story is told through the voices of two distinct characters diametrically opposed to the other's views on just about everything. The first is Franck's James Holden - XO of the Canterbury, an ice-hauling freighter. Despite some previous naval experience and being an Earther in the Outer Planets, Holden has remained an optimistic fellow. He sees the solar system in black-and-white terms: "So, now the Canterbury and her dozens of sister ships in the Pur'n'Kleen Water Company made the loop from Saturn's generous rings to the Belt and back hauling glaciers, and until the ships aged into salvage wrecks. Jim Holden saw some poetry in that." Holden's universe is an easy math equation where people are naturally good and everything adds up.

On the other side of this is Abraham's Joe Miller. A detective on Ceres Station in the Belt. A noirish cynic. The guy who's seen it all and buried it at the bottom of a whiskey glass. Though he works for a security company owned by an Earth corporation, Miller is a Belter by birth and distrustful of anyone who's ever seen a sky or not had their water and their air pumped in from outside. Yet, what makes Miller a good detective is his ability to detach himself when necessary, to notice the facts, regardless of personal sentiment. As Abraham notes, "When Miller started working homicide, one of the things that had struck him was the surreal calm of the victims' families. People who had just lost wives, husbands, children, and lovers. People whose lives had just been branded by violence. More often that not, they were calmly offering drinks and answering questions, making the detectives feel welcome...A month earlier Miller...had been the steadying hand of the law. Now they were employees of an Earth-based security contractor. The difference was subtle, but it was deep."

Holden's and Miller's worlds collide when the Canterbury picks up a distress signal from a derelict ship - the Scopuli - and responds, to discover the horror that's happened to its crew. As Holden transmits data that ignites an already tense situation between the Belt and Mars, Miller is assigned the job of searching for the missing Julie Mao. The link: Mao was one of the crew on the Scopuli.

There is a lot to like in Leviathan Wakes. The aforementioned "vomit zombies" are a real treat. There is a great backstory concerning the colonization of the solar system and the evolutionary process of humanity. There's a sleek generation ship built by the Mormons. There are gunfights and secretive corporations. There are elements of hard SF mixed with rock 'em sock 'em adventure, giving the story a realistic and gritty tone throughout. Hints of Heinlein and Clarke are all over the place.

However, the foremost engaging part of Leviathan Wakes is the relationship between Miller and Holden. It's about watching these characters grow and feed off each other (zombie pun intended) and shape events around them, understanding the future from their point of view. Through Miller's eyes Holden can look a naive fool who believes the best in people; through Holden's eyes Miller is an unpredictable wild man with a penchant for getting shot at and shooting everything in sight. Yet, through their own eyes, each man is sensible and rational and seeing things through the best way he can. Highly Recommended.

Leviathan Wakes is the first in the Expanse series and will be released June 15th, 2011. It is available for pre-order now.

Also Recommended: Dread Empire's Fall Trilogy by Walter Jon Williams.

Review: Welcome to the Greenhouse, edited by Gordon van Gelder

With the recent successes of novels like Ian McDonald's River of Gods and, particularly, Paolo Bacigalupi's The Wind-up Girl and the YA novel, Ship Breaker, environmental issues have garnered a lot of attention from the science fiction community. It's small wonder, then, that an anthology like Welcome to the Greenhouse: New Science Fiction on Climate Change would crop up . That it's edited by Gordon van Gelder, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and features some of the top names in the industry - well, that's just icing on the cake.

The sixteen stories contained in Greenhouse are as varied and as hard to pin down as the causes and effects of climate change on the Earth. There are ruminations and mood pieces (such as opener "Benkoelen" by Brian W. Aldiss and "Sundown" by Chris Lawson); twisted, dark comedies on the aftereffects of global warming ("That Creeping Sensation" by Alan Dean Foster and "Not A Problem" by Matthew Hughes); strange godlike humans ("Damned When You Do" by Jeff Carlson and "Come Again Some Other Day" by Michael Alexander); and those wherein climate change is present but less central to the story ("The Men of Summer" by David Prill and "Fish Cakes" by Ray Vukcevich).

Highlights in this anthology include Judith Moffett's "The Middle of Somewhere," about the disparity between modern technology and living "off the grid." In this story, set not in a near- or far-future but a time happening right now, a teenage girl researching nesting birds in the Kentucky wilderness is suddenly faced with survival and a lack of modern technological luxuries after a devastating tornado strikes the home of the woman she's staying with.

Gregory Benford's "Eagle" is another standout. Benford imbues his story with the ironic and a sense of moral ambiguity. As eco-terrorists try to stop the re-freezing of the arctic, a village of Inuit plan to finally return home. A fantastically dubious ending leaves the reader with a mouthful of ash on the question of right and wrong.

"FarmEarth" by Paul di Filippo is wildly innovative and lively, even if it's premise is a bit implausible. In di Filippo's future, cleanup from the effects of climate change is handled through the virtual world - essentially, like playing app off Facebook. A boy about to turn thirteen (the age you can "download the FarmEarth app") is about to get the chance of a lifetime - and that's when everything goes wrong.

Yet, it is Bruce Sterling's "The Master of the Aviary," that is perhaps the best of the stories presented in Greenhouse. It is also the hardest to classify: "Aviary" is part survival story, Socratic meditation, cautionary tale, and all alien. Selder, the sustainable community "Aviary" is set in, has laws and practices common to the present, but that have been skewed enough to feel a little...off. Sterling's distant prose only reinforces that feeling of disconnect. Regardless, the characters' plights are as human as ever, and the last line is as heartbreaking as it is disconcerting.

In handling a controversial topic such as climate change, there is sometimes a propensity toward heavy-handedness and preachy scare tactics. Thankfully, van Gelder has picked writers without such propensities; Greenhouse never strays too close to either pro- or anti- sentiments on climate change. Instead, the stories and characters here seethe with life and wonder. Sometimes that life is bleak and terrible and sometimes it has become so alien as to be unrecognizable. Throughout each of them, however, remains that which is impossible to suppress: humanity and the will to survive.

Buy now it from Or Books or from Amazon.


--Dustin J Monk

Review: The Ouroboros Wave by Jyouji Hayashi

The Ouroboros Wave by Jyouji Hayashi is one of those "hard sf" novels packed with ideas. Technically speaking (that's not really a pun, but it kind of is), Ouroboros is not a novel: it's a series of interlinked short stories detailing humankind's accidental stumble into the stars; though every discovery pushes us closer to an understanding of our place in the universe. Indeed, Hayashi's motif throughout is "happensance is necessity in disguise."

The first of these interlinked stories concerns a black hole discovered by, you guessed it, happenstance. What's particularly interesting about the black hole, dubbed Kali - the Hindu goddess of destruction - is that it's on a collision course with the sun, our sun. Unfortunately, scientists are unable to determine if that collision will be in a few hundred years or in a few thousand. Rather than wasting time debating, an artificial accretion disk is built around Kali to not only change its course toward Uranus, but also, once in orbit around the gas giant, to harness the black hole's "boundless energy." However, in these early development stages, an AI nicknamed Shiva begins exhibting signs of awareness outside of cyberspace - that is, human-like intelligence - and endangering the scientists living on the artificial accretion disk.

In fact, what Hayashi is most concerned with throughout these stories besides proving that happenstance is masked necessity is determining what is and is not intelligent. In another of the stories, a submarine is encapsulated in the mouth of a giant jellyfish-like creature in the icy oceans beneath the surface of Europa; this creature may or may not be the first signs of intelligent life outside of Earth. In another, an assassin must out-think a complex system of identification modules to make her target. Is Hayashi also asking the question: is intelligence formed from happenstance?

We haven't even discussed the surplus of cool sf ideas rampant throughout Ouroboros. For instance: Amphisbaena, the needle-like station in orbit around the artificial accretion disk that houses the scientists; the web system of data transfer; the AI Salmon; the different political structures between Earthborn and Spaceborn peoples; etc.

If there is one detriment to Hayashi's Wave, it's the prose. The prose is so dry at times it's like reading sandpaper. I don't know if Hayashi's voice is this dry in the original Japanese or if something was lost in Jim Hubbert's translation; either way, it can make for tedious reading. There is also a lot of "telling, not showing," in the text, which is one of my pet peeves. The redeeming quality (other than the wealth of ideas and an interesting backstory) is that because Ouroboros is hard sf - I mean, extreme hard sf - the reader can get easily lost in those large, scientific words, but Hayashi is a master of making big concepts (like exactly how an artificial accretion disk might harness the energy of a black hole) easily understood.

The Ouroboros Wave is worth the read; however, if you're not a deep lover of hard sf (and, typically, I am not) you're going to have to get through some pretty serious slog to enjoy the story.