Tag: fiction

Indie-published Fantasy and SF: How to Find It

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasyLeave a comment
Thanks to Alice from Pixabay for this fun royalty-free illustration.

In my last post, I wondered about the big speculative fiction awards and what it means that their “best novel” awards tilt so heavily to those sold by established publishing companies. Some of the short-listed novels this year were indie-published, though–that is, they were published by very small presses or by the author herself.

In the past, indie-published novels–and especially self-published novels–were sneered at. A writer who self-published a novel would be pitied or scorned as a victim of vanity publishing–taken advantage of by predatory “publishing” companies that printed a book cheaply, charged a fortune to the naive writer, forced the writer to buy a lot of copies, and dumped them on her with no editorial or marketing services.

Scams of this type still exist, along with many other scammy, scummy publishing practices. Have you ever thought of writing your own fantasy or SF? Make sure you get to know this well-respected site that helps writers avoid traps for the unwary: Writer Beware, an invaluable service to writers everywhere, sponsored by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association.

But in the past few decades, many writers have escaped the bounds of traditional publishing. This trend comes as traditional publishing companies have increasingly fallen under the control of conglomerates whose main focus is not books; as these conglomerates have consolidated so that now there are only four or five big traditional publishers, with a corresponding shrinkage of their lists; as the conglomerates have focused increasingly on safe bets like known writers, or writers with big existing platforms (huge numbers of social media followers, for example), and celebrity writers; as the conglomerates have increasingly cut their marketing budgets for all but a few superstar performers. It’s pretty similar to what has happened in the recording industry. As a result, a lot of writers have struck out on their own, with mixed results for most. If the writer is not adept at marketing, her work tends to go unnoticed by readers. And every writer could use an editor! (Well, maybe not Shakespeare. His admirers enthused, “Shakespeare never blotted a line!” To which his colleague Ben Jonson snidely remarked, “Would he had blotted a thousand”–I guess Ben thought even the immortal Will could have used an editor.) All of the tasks of marketing and vetting fall to the writer herself, and that does not work out well for many. On the other hand, many indie-published writers do well, to the great benefit of readers.

FOR YOU, the READER–how do you discover indie-published books you’d like to read? There are ways to do that. Here are just a few speculative fiction indie-published resources:

Blogs by book lovers–a great resource! Here’s a list of one blogger’s top ten indie faves in 2024. Here’s another blogger’s take. And another, this one focusing on fantasy. I should publish my own list!

Commercial sites for book-lovers publish lists of this type. For example, the Amazon-owned site Goodreads publishes this one for SF readers.

Booksellers themselves: My new favorite bookseller platform, Bookshop.org, publishes lists like this, and other sites do as well (Amazon, Barnes&Noble, etc.)

Your friendly librarian. I can’t stress this enough. Librarians know their stuff, and they are trained to find stuff out.

This blog presents a useful list of small presses that publish speculative fiction.

Big review sites like Kirkus Reviews publish lists of indie fantasy and SF. Here’s one.

There are sites helping indie authors promote their books, such as this one for SF.

Finally: more DYI attempts within a short timeframe, such as this SF and fantasy book sale happening right now. Full disclosure, shameless self-promotion: I’m in this one! So are a lot of other people, though, so take a look.

The Hugo Awards–and the Usual Controversies

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasyLeave a comment

The Hugo Awards for 2025 are soon to be announced. Here is the list of finalists for best novel:

  • The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett (Del Rey, Hodderscape UK)
  • The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Avid Reader Press, Sceptre)
  • A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher (Tor)
  • Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tordotcom)
  • Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Orbit US, Tor UK)
  • Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell (DAW)

The winner will be announced on August 16, 2025 at Seattle WorldCon. That means you, Reader, have time for some catch-up reading if you haven’t gotten around to all these wonderful novels. I had a fairly easy job of it, since several of the novels on the Hugo list were also short-listed for the Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke awards, and I had already read them before the Hugo finalists were announced.

Disclaimer: I only review the novels. Yet so many wonderful reading experiences await in the other categories! Go to the Hugo Awards web site to find them all.

In the next several posts, I’ll review the short-listed Hugo Awards nominees for best novel.

As always, I need to mention the latest controversy roiling the Hugos. It seems one of these rears its ugly head every year or so. Last year’s controversy was about alleged censorship related to the WorldCon host for the 2024 awards, China. This year’s is about AI. How trendy. Several officials of WorldCon have resigned over the brouhaha. Briefly: In order to cut down on workload BUT ALSO to deal with possible sensitivity issues in the U.S., the WorldCon officials vetted their panel of judges using ChatGPG. Unfortunately, these AI tools are notoriously unreliable, and often seem to reflect possible prejudices. The use of the tool may have helped out with the workload, but how trustworthy was the resulting panel? The decision to use AI for this purpose was also hugely tone deaf, considering the widespread distrust and animus that the SF community feels toward such tools. Find an account of the controversy HERE.

AI in general, and especially for writers, is a magnet for controversy. The Hugos controversy, thankfully, didn’t involve any use of AI by writers, but it does (or did, until WorldCon took corrective action) impugn the integrity of the award, one of the longest-standing, most respected awards for speculative fiction. As a writer myself, I found this blog post–on the Hugo controversy specifically and the use of AI by writers generally–to be especially interesting. How far should the literary world and individual writers go in embracing these tools flooding into the creative process?

For myself, I don’t use it–I say. Then I think again. But I never use grammar checkers, because in my experience they are dead wrong too much of the time and give bad advice even when they are (sort of) right. Good grammar–good. Good grammar used slavishly–wooden writing. (You see those two sentence fragments I just used?) I do use spell checkers, although not all the time. When I do, I use them very judiciously. They too can provide misleading or just wrong advice. I’d rather risk the occasional typo, which comes to us all. And those are very, very basic uses of Al. Generative AI to write a novel? Horrible, horrible idea. Generative AI to plot a novel, organize time, create marketing copy, and so on? Iffy at best.

AND THEN I climb down off my high horse to realize I have sometimes used AI-generated illustrations for this very blog. I am resolving right now not to resort to that in the future. More problematic for me: As a starving artist, I can’t afford to hire a voice actor to narrate my novels. Do I use AI-generated voices, especially considering how many consumers of fiction get their jollies from audiobooks and not the kind you process with your eyeballs? I’m thinking about it. Am I wrong? Am I a hypocrite? The horror! The horror!

NEXT UP: Reviews of short-listed novels by Robert Jackson Bennet and Kalianne Bradley.

The Arthur C. Clarke Awards short list: Final words

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasy2 Comments

The novels short-listed for this major speculative fiction award include:

  • Annie Bot, Sierra Greer WINNER, reviewed in this post
  • Private Rites, Julia Armfield
  • The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley
  • Extremophile, Ian Green
  • Service Model, Adrian Tchaikovsky–reviewed in this post
  • Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock, Maud Woolf

In my last post, I reviewed the novels by by Green and Woolf. The first post in this series reviewed the novels by Armfield and Bradley.

Service Model, Adrian Tchaikovsky(2024, Tor)

Find out more HERE.

Pay no attention to the masterful, wizardly author behind the curtain. Charles the robot, aka Uncharles, is the star of this show. Here’s the story of total societal collapse told through the point of view of a robot completely hung up on procedure. Technically, you might call the point of view “close-in third person.” We don’t see straight through Charles’s eyes, but we do see all the novel’s events through his robot take on the world. It’s a tour-de-force.

In the opening scene, Charles, a valet robot, has just murdered his master. He has no idea that’s what he has done, just that after he has shaved his master with the usual straight razor, a mysterious red stain on his master’s clothing must be dealt with. You can think here of C-3PO or Murderbot, but really, Tchaikovsky’s portrayal–while every bit as sly and satirical–goes much deeper, into the ways robots operate and how they really might approach the end of humanity and the human-built world.

In his attempt to get his obvious if puzzling robot dysfunction addressed, Charles goes on a lengthy odyssey that takes him to all the important sites of human societal dysfunction: the clogged-up bureaucratic systems, the lust for power run amuck, the misappropriation of information technology, the misunderstanding of what robots are and what they are capable of accomplishing. It’s a kind of reverse Wizard of Oz. In this world of encroaching uncontrolled AI, the problems Charles encounters are also important issues for Tchaikovsky’s human readers.

Charles’s perspective and his trajectory change when he happens upon another seeming dysfunctional robot calling herself The Wonk. Together, the two first work together simply to survive, but then they begin working on the main problem, how to salvage society. They make the perfect team: Charles’s dogged procedural robot nature and The Wonk’s creative unpredictability. She must be a very dysfunctional robot, then, mustn’t she?

This book is incredibly fun to read, and underneath the fun lurks a sly message. It was short-listed not only for this year’s Arthur C. Clarke award, which it didn’t win, but also for the upcoming Hugos.

Annie Bot, Sierra Greer (2024, HarperCollins)

This year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award WINNER for best novel

Find out more HERE.

It’s easy to see why this novel won this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award. It’s the very engaging first-person account of an AI girlfriend and her struggles with her controlling boyfriend/owner, so it checks a lot of SF boxes as well as a lot of relationship boxes. I don’t pretend to know how awards committees come up with their decisions. All I know about it I learned from Percival Everett’s Erasure. But I can see why this novel would be a popular choice.

I paired my review of this book with Tchaikovsky’s because, well, robots, right? There the comparison ends. Although. . . they are both books from the robot perspective. Greer’s novel goes whole hog; it is written in first person, so everything we see, we see through Annie Bot’s eyes. This also, I imagine, makes the book fun and accessible for readers who come to their task of fictional empathizing through this increasingly common technical writing device.

In a near future, this novel postulates that lonely men can buy themselves a robot companion for sex. That is not SF. It is absolutely believable, since personal robots are already on the market and sex robots are definitely a thing (Be warned before you click on that link to a site called The Guy Shack, if you don’t want your eyeballs or your internet history to reflect such a topic, and I hope my kids understand after I’m gone that I’m just a writer doing her research!). The science fiction part comes in when the main character of this novel, Annie Bot, a robot, begins to explore her own agency. Or is that SF? Here’s the intriguing premise behind the novel. Which of your friends’ girlfriends is actually human, and which might just be pretending? The Turing Test comes to mind. But Annie’s struggle also reflects real issues of abuse and control in intimate relationships. The writing sounds sort of robotic, but I guess that fits the character. It’s an engaging novel and a fast read.

AT THIS POINT in my series of reviews for short-listed novels, I usually pick my favorite. And I never try to second-guess the judges, because as I mentioned above in this post, I have no idea what drives them. It feels funny to do that now that a decision has been made, but I can tell you that FOR ME and me alone, there was no contest. My favorite of the novels in this list was Ian Green’s Extremophile. I found almost all the others to be interesting, worthwhile, and often entertaining novels, and I’m glad I read all of them.

NEXT: on to the short-listed novels for the 2025 Hugo Awards.