Love Death + Robots: The Official Anthology: Vol. 1!

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Okay, this is a cool project. You may remember that my story "Ice Age" was made into an episode of Love Death + Robots, the terrific series of animated short science fiction created by Tim Miller  and David Fincher. In fact, Tim Miller himself directed my episode. I was pretty chuffed about that.

Now there's an e-book collecting the stories and screenplays the cartoons were based on.  Publication date is May 14 but it's available for pre-order now. I look forward to getting my copy so I can see what changes were made in the adaptation. (The line "Too soon" in my episode? Tim Miller's addition--and a good one, too.)

Here are the links they gave me:

Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0923HJQ5G

Amazon AU: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B0923HJQ5G

Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0923HJQ5G

Amazon CA: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0923HJQ5G

 

 

And yes . . .

 

I regret that there's not a hardcover too. But given that Cohesion Press, the publisher, is in Australia and that the mails are what they are today, you could go made waiting for the book to arrive.

 

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Annie Without Crow!

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I'm in virtual print again!

"Annie Without Crow" is up on Tor.com.  The lovely portrait of Annie above, by Wylie Beckert, illustrates the story. The talented Jonathan Strahan edited.

And what, you ask, is the plot? Well, Annie, who is the avatar of Romantic Love, has a falling-out with her one true love, Crow, who is Trickster. And when something like that happens, what's a girl to do but retreat to her all-female estate in the sixteenth century and plot revenge upon all males everywhere and everywhen?

Romance doesn't always play nice.

You can read the story here. Or, you know, just go to Tor.com and poke around. There are a lot of good stories and articles to be found there. 

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A Requiem for Old Bessie

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For years and possibly even decades, whenever I chanced to post a picture of my office, people would ignore the ostensible subject of the post and exclaim in horror,: You're still using a CRT monitor?!

Well, yes, I'd  reply. It still works fine.

But think of all the extra space you'd have if you bought a flat screen instead.

Well... As it turns out, things are as mortal as people. Old Bessie (a name I gave the CRT monitor posthumously when I realized how much I was going to miss it) died and I had no choice but to get with the times.

And now look! My desktop, which had earlier been merely cluttered, is now a parody of itself. There are books and notebooks and office supplies on top, a tin box I used to gather up I forget what (for neatness' sake), half-written stories, a printout of someone else's novel, magazines, CDs and mini-CDs, an orange 3.5 inch floppy disk, and look here! a letter from Gene Wolfe. 

I'm afraid to dig any deeper, list I find old obligations, safely forgotten long ago, and realize I still have to deal with them. But clearly, Old Bessie, by taking up so much of my desktop, was imposing a degree of neatness that the newcomer, slim and sleek as it is, simply cannot. There's a moral here, and I think we all know what it is:

Never tidy up. It just makes more room for clutter to accumulate.

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Life Hacks for Readers

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Life Hack for Readers No. 1:

In a pinch, a book can be used as a bookmark for another book.

 

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Was There EVER a Cyberpunk?

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I was just now reading Paul Di Filippo's glowing review of Bruce Sterling's new Tachyon Publications collection Robot Artists & Black Swans: The Italian Fantascienza Stories, in which Paul reflects on  how much cyberpunk (by which he means, chiefly, Bruce) has changed in the past 35 or so years.

Cyberpunk, the movement, which was created by Sterling, served him well in the early years, though he never much cared for the name and I doubt he's entirely pleased with how it's still stuck on him, however much his fiction has changed. But thinking about the Old Days brought up a memory of a genial argument that Ellen Datlow and I had back then.

I posited, for various reasons that no longer matter, that there was no such thing as cyberpunk, but that if there were, William Gibson wasn't a part of it. Ellen smiled and said that she was absolutely certain that there was such a thing as cyberpunk and that Bill was its only practitioner.

All these years later, there's been an ironic reversal. The world has decided that cyberpunk exists but that Bill Gibson is no longer a part of it. Meanwhile, I've decided that Ellen was right on both counts.

 I can't say I'm surprised. Ellen is a very insightful woman.

You can read Paul's review here.  

 

And as long as I'm here . . .

I haven't been promoting my own books with all the egotistical vigor I should have. Mea culpa. So this is just a reminder that the ebook of Vacuum Flowers is still on sale and will remain so for the rest of the month of March.

You can find the details here. 

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Annie Without Crow

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I have a new story coming on Tor.Com, this April 7! That's the title and the cover illustration up above. The artist was Wylie Beckert. Who did, I think you'll agree, a great job of it.

Yes, "Annie Without Crow" makes "The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O" the first story of a series. No, I don't expect there to be any more . It's a two-story series. 

Here's how it came about:

Years ago, Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman came to the Main Line for a reading. Marianne and I of course went to listen. Afterward, Ellen hit me up for a story for an anthology she was hoping to sell of fantasies based on border ballads. She suggested a few possible titles.

"None of these really sing to me," I said dubiously. "But if you can come up with two vivid images that don't fit together, I'll give it a try." This is the way I write.

Alas, Ellen couldn't get into the game. It's not the way she writes. But on the way home, I said to Marianne, "One element is a trailor truck full of Deinonychus. What's the other?"

Quick as a flash, Marianne said, "A basket full of dead puppies."

"I can write this bastard!" I crowed.

And so I did. "The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O"was the story of how Trickster fell in love with another man's wife and the price he paid to win her. I like the story a lot. It has some rough moments, but it's romantic.

But it bothered me that, though Annie is, in the story, obviously worth everything that Crow goes through for her, she never really got to show how ruthless she could be in her own right. Hence, "Annie Without Crow."

At the end of the first story, after all, Annie became an Avatar and a particularly dangerous one at that. She's nobody you'd want to cross.

But odds are you already have. When you read the story, you'll see what I mean.

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Every Day is a Small Adventure

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On Monday, the governor of Pennsylvania eased travel restrictions, making it possible to leave the state without having to quarantine oneself for fourteen days upon re-entry. (There's not actually any mechanism for enforcing this; but once you start cutting corners on safety...) So I decided to play hooky from work. Marianne and I went down to Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge in Delaware. This is as safe an activity as can be had in pandemic times. Mostly, we were inside a car and, when we weren't, we were outside and (with one exception) never within six feet of another human being. 

Then, maybe two hours into the refuge, we stopped to look at a great blue heron (that's it above) and when we tried to start up the car again... nothing.

As adventures go, this was a small one, within the hour, a cheerful auto mechanic was telling us that Bombay Hook was his favorite place on earth and that he was grateful to have the call because not only was it a beautiful day but, being on call, he didn't have to pay admission. So he got us going, we curtailed our day and we made it back to Philadelphia on an almost-empty tank of gas.

But it reminded me of how, before Covid-19, almost every day was like that one. Full of unexpected events and strange occurrences. I'm looking forward to being in that situation again.

Also, the great blue was a sport about the whole thing. It stayed in the pond the entire time, stalking its prey and filling up on small fish and creepy-crawlies. So we had something to watch while we waited.

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