SF in SF header image 1

June Reading Preview

May 22nd, 2011 · No Comments

Saturday, June 11th

SF in SF welcome authors Nick Mamatas and Lisa Goldstein.

We’ll be celebrating new book launches with two fantastic local authors.

Nick Mamatas is an American horror, science fiction and fantasy author and editor for the Haikasoru line of translated Japanese science fiction novels for Viz Media. His fiction has been nominated for several awards, including several Bram Stoker Awards, while he has also been recognised for his editoral work through World Fantasy Award and Hugo Award nominations. He is also online, with his own inimitable take on things, at Nihilistic Kid on Live Journal.

Sensation, out from PM Press, tells the story of what happens when Julia Hernandez leaves her husband, shoots a real estate developer, and then vanishes without a trace, slipping out of the world she knew and into the Simulacrum — a place where human history is both guided and thwarted by the conflict between a species of anarchist wasps and a collective of hyperintelligent spiders. Told ultimately from the collective point of view of another species, this allegorical novel plays with the elements of the Simulacrum apparent in real life — media reports, business speak, blog entries, text messages, psychological-evaluation forms, and the lies lovers tell one another — and poses a fascinating idea that displaces human beings from the center of the universe and makes them simply the pawns of two warring species.

Starve Better, out from Apex Books, is, well, a different take on the usual writer-survival guides that promise riches and fame. They want to feed you a (near) impossible dream in order to take your money. Not Nick Mamatas. Well, he wants your money, but Nick’s not going to lie to you to get it. Starve Better is a no-nonsense survival guide by a professional writer who knows how to use small press publications and writing for everyone from corporate clients to friends and neighbors to keep himself out of the soup kitchen line. Witty. Acerbic. Full of truth. Starve Better is a must have for writers and fans of genre fiction.

Lisa Goldstein is a A Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Award-nominated fantasy and science fiction writer. Her 1982 novel The Red Magician won the American Book Award for best paperback novel, and has remained in print, currently available in mmpb from Starscape. An utterly compelling tale of the Holocaust, it starts on the eve of World War II, when a young magician arrives in a small Hungarian village, prophesying death and destruction — yet only 13-year old Kicsi believes him. She tries to help him warn the villagers, but the local rabbi, who also possesses magical powers, frustrates their attempts. Then the Nazis come, and everyone in the village, including Kicsi and her family, are sent to concentration camps. Can the power of the Red Magician help them survive?

In her long-awaited new novel, The Uncertain Places, now out from Tachyon Publications, an ages-old family secret breaches the boundaries between reality and magic, revealing the places between them. A long-lost fairy tale straight out of Grimm’s… except that it mysteriously was never included in their printed books… perhaps because it was, in fact, real. When Berkeley student Will Taylor is introduced by his best friend Ben to the mysterious Feierabend sisters, Will quickly falls for enigmatic Livvy, a chemistry major and accomplished chef. But Livvy’s family — vivacious actress Maddie, family historian Rose, and their mother, absent-minded Sylvia — are behaving strangely. The Feierabend women believe that luck is their handmaiden, and so it is, almost as though they are living in a fairy tale. The price for such gifts turns out to be extremely high, making the efforts of Will and Ben to unravel the riddle of a supernatural bargain risky, even while they hope to save Livvy from what appears to be an inescapable fate.

Tags: Jun11 · Lisa Goldstein · Nick Mamatas