When I was in first grade and got picked as Central Elementary School’s “Writer of the Week,” I was pretty sure that, with a little hard work, I would be published before I graduated to middle school. I’m sure I’m not the only one with something like this in his or her past. I’ve wanted to write a book ever since I was little. For a while, in high school and college, I wrote plays instead, and for a while after college I thought I wanted to write movies. Then I did what I’d planned to do in first grade, and I wrote a book.

Today, more than two weeks before I’d prepared myself for it, Nathan and I found it in a bookstore, like…like it belonged there, with the rest of the Real Books.

Here it is, courtesy of Nathan:

Now, The Boneshaker was supposed to come out–let me check my countdown widget–eighteen days from now. So I didn’t have time to figure out what I would say to the very nice woman behind the counter at Word, the first bookstore I found it in. Because…I don’t know why…I wanted to say something. I desperately wanted to say to her, that’s my book and I can’t believe you have it here, faced out and pretty on a shelf for me to find. I wanted to say thank you, I guess, only I was about to cry and not really thinking that clearly about the whole thing so I thought, I can’t say that, that’ll sound dumb…I’ll just ask when it came in. So I went to the desk and started to ask my fake question and I got as far as, “Um, you have…there’s a book…The Boneshaker over there and”–here’s where I started wrinkling up my face and gulping air and the bookseller started to look panicked–”and I wrote it and”–tears started about here–”and it was going to be out way later and when did it…when did…”

But she brightened up as soon as I got out the I wrote it part and said, “That’s your book? That’s so great! Congratulations! Would you sign the copies for us?” Like I hadn’t just about had a meltdown in front of her. Bless her. I wanted to hug her.

So here’s me, signing two copies of The Boneshaker for the first time, at Word in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I don’t have words for what this felt like. And now I have to stop, or I’ll start crying again.

First, the free stuff, because I know that’s what people really want to know about. The Enchanted Inkpot turns one year old this April, and in honor of this very important anniversary, the Inkpot has put together two very, very cool giveaways this month. The first ends April 14–THAT’S TODAY, PEOPLE!–with a winner announced on the 16th, along with the prizes for the second contest.The best part is this: all you need to do is comment on this post right here and tell the Inkpot about a middle-grade or young adult book you read that you’d recommend. A winner will be chosen at random, and here’s what that winner will get:

• Theodosia and the Eyes of Horus by R.L. LaFevers (signed hardcover)
• Shadow by Jenny Moss (signed hardcover)
• The Boneshaker by Kate Milford (signed ARC – hardcover comes out May 24, 2010!)
• Brightly Woven by Alexandra Bracken (ARC)
• Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin (signed hardcover)
• The Runaway Dragon by Kate Coombs (signed hardcover)
• Faery Rebels: Spell Hunter by R.J. Anderson (signed hardcover)
• The Unnameables by Ellen Booraem (signed hardcover)
• Possessions by Nancy Holder (signed paperback)

Further info to be found at the Enchanted Inkpot. Comment and win! How easy is that? And, in a convenient segue to Happy Thing Number One, I will include one of these sweet posters with the ARC I’m contributing:

Don’t go crazy looking for info at that link yet. The posters got here so fast the page isn’t live yet…but it’s coming. This, by the way, is text from The Boneshaker: it’s the handbill announcing Jake Limberleg’s Nostrum Fair and Technological Medicine Show to the town of Arcane. In a further by the way, the company that did these is called Contact, and you can find them here and reach them at ideas@gomakecontact.com. They are unbelievably nice, can work within even a meager budget like mine, they arranged printing and delivery, and the turnaround was super-fast. Speaking of which, if you know a bookstore or coffee shop or other random location that might be willing to post one, shoot me an email or comment and I’ll send some to you. I’ll take all the help I can get in getting the word out.

Other happy news! A couple of weeks ago I did my first school visit at Yonkers Montessori Academy. I spoke with Mrs. Audevard’s 6th grade class, and Ms. Governali’s 7th/8th grade class. It was an absolutely wonderful first experience: the kids, the teachers, and the school were unbelievably welcoming and enthusiastic. And a couple of days ago, I went to my new PO box for the first time and discovered they’d sent me mail!

We’d talked about the idea of crossroads, and the kids each wrote me about a crossroads they’d experienced in their lives. Lots of them asked if I’d ever had to face a difficult crossroads like the ones they had. Needless to say, the answer is of course. And it’s often true, as several of my new correspondents suggested, that sometimes choices that seem like no big deal turn out to be far more important than they seemed at the time. The reverse is also true: sometimes a choice that seems like it ought to be no big deal can be just as hard to make as one you know will have lasting consequences. Because every choice means taking a chance or  giving something up, and those are never easy things to do.

Lastly but most excitingly, a very cool thing happened to me a little bit ago. A friend of mine who happens to be in the book buying business emailed me that she’d gotten an arc that she thought was right up my alley. The next time I stopped by her store to visit, she handed me an advance review copy of Matthew Kirby’s gorgeous debut, The Clockwork Three. This was cool for several reasons: firstly, it is right up my alley; secondly, it is a flipping beautiful ARC; and thirdly, I’VE READ THIS BOOK AND IT’S ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC. I met Matt Kirby via the SCBWI message boards, and we’ve exchanged a couple stories and a couple manuscripts over the last year or so. Matt’s absolutely a lovely human being and a tremendous writer, and you should really mark your calendars for the release of this, his first novel, in October. (More detailed review to come a little closer to the release date.)

So those are my happy thoughts for this week! Stay tuned for the next installment of my commentaries on the Nebula finalists–voting is over, but the adventure continues. Until then…

Well, here we are in the third installment of the Informed Voter Project. Today I’ll be looking at the Novella finalists!

In the first post on short stories I wrote that for me, each one was a tale about identity. The novelettes, I felt, sustained my little thesis. The novellas didn’t play along quite as nicely, though. This week, the Identity Thesis suffers a bit of a setback—but who cares, when the reading’s so good?

The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, Kage Baker

The women in question constitute an elite group of information gatherers for the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society—they are whores only incidentally. When four European power brokers are invited to the house of Lord Basmond, a noble offering a levitating technology at auction, Lady Beatrice and three of her cohorts are dispatched as the entertainment for the house party. Then Lord Basmond is murdered the night before the bidding begins, and the girls suddenly have not just a world-altering technology to secure for the Society, but a murder to solve.

If there’s an identity piece here, it’s Lady Beatrice’s discovery that, once ruined and abandoned by her family, she can still be of use; this time, in service to her country—but that’s a bit of a stretch. This story is an adventure with very, very cool detailing: the chain of events that brings Lady Beatrice to Nell Gwynne’s, for instance, and Mr. Felmouth, the Society’s “Q,” who invents marvelous gadgets. And there’s a pretty seriously cool twist at the end—this story turns out to be not exactly the story you think it is. I love when that happens.

“Arkfall,” Carolyn Ives Gilman

On the water-covered planet of Ben, the great work of creating a livable environment relies on people like Osaji, crewmembers on spherical arks that make rounds of the underwater world. It’s an ongoing project, the work of generations, and it depends on the selflessness of the Bennite people and their willingness to sacrifice their personal comfort. It’s a society stifled by politeness and vaguely passive-aggressive manipulation. This is how Osaji wound up traveling with her grandmother, Mota—she’s never been able to say no. When her new ark is cut loose in an underground eruption, Osaji and Mota wind up alone in the vessel with a loudmouthed outworlder named Jack.

Now we’re back in—not to be cute—more comfortable waters as far as the Identity Thesis is concerned. Osaji’s life is defined by her willingness and ability to sacrifice her personal wishes to someone or something else. The Bennites’ language alone is worth the price of admission. When Osaji goes to inquire about leaving Ben, the Immigration agent shuts her down without a single impolite question. Osaji’s own brother-in-law can’t address her directly, because it’s impolite. While inquiring about joining a new ark, Osaji can’t even claim she’s good at her particular specialty because it would sound like boasting. And when she asks Mota if she’d prefer to go on another round, Mota will not—cannot—make a choice. In order to transform the world, the Bennites have transformed themselves, trading away all their individuality for the sake of the Great Work.

“Act One,” Nancy Kress

In Hollywood of the near future, Jane Snow is doing research for her next film. Barry, her agent, accompanies her to an interview with a Group that specializes in gene modification; specifically, they engineer children with Arlen’s Syndrome. Arlen’s children are sensitive, able to read verbal and nonverbal cues so well they almost seem to read minds. What ensues, of course, is a wonderful meditation on morality and what it means to be normal in a world that’s capable of significant genetic modification.

There are a lot of great things about this story. Barry, a dwarf, was unable to imagine having an “average” child, so he convinced his wife to agree to modify the fetus to ensure that it would be born a dwarf, too—by the time the story opens, his family has been torn apart and his son, Ethan, is a complete stranger to him. The Group, it turns out, isn’t just turning out Arlen’s kids; it’s also turning out a very easily transmitted compound that changes behavior. And the entire story takes place under the scrutiny of the media as the script for Jane’s film is being finished, a film that will make a major statement about Arlen’s kids by bringing them to the screen for the first time.  And the ending–oh, it’s just phenomenal.

Shambling Towards Hiroshima, James Morrow

In the Hollywood of the past, an actor famous for portraying movie monsters is drafted by the U.S. military to play the role of a lifetime. The U.S. is still rushing to get the Bomb, but they’ve beaten Hitler and the Japanese in the race to get the Lizard. Certain parties in the military want to unleash firebreathing behemoths on the Japanese, but cooler heads want to stage a smaller-scale demonstration first in the hopes that if the Japanese delegation sees a model of Shirazuka being leveled by a giant lizard, they’ll convince their leaders to surrender. The problem: the dwarf behemoths are annoyingly docile. The solution: horror legend Syms J. Thorley and a Personal Reptile Rig. Operation Fortune Cookie: nothing can possibly go wrong.

So much great stuff here. The story’s narrated by Thorley, holed up in a Baltimore hotel room (after a horror conference in which he’s been awarded a Raydo lifetime achievement award) as he drinks Amontillado, writes his memoir on yellow notepads, and debates whether, when he’s finished, he’ll take a shuttle to the airport or jump out the window to his death. His tale is studded with stars real and imagined, from James Whale who has been drafted to direct Thorley in his PRR in What Rough Beast (the script written for Operation Fortune Cookie) to Sigfried K. Dagover, Thorley’s nemesis both onscreen and off. Clever repartee abounds, along with Hollywood twists and betrayals, unimaginably high stakes and ample doses of nostalgia. I loved it.

“Sublimation Angels,” Jason Sanford

On the frozen planet of Eur, a small core of humans struggles to eke out a living underground. Their mission is to survive in the unforgiving planet while trying to make contact with the Aurals–alien beings like balls of colored light so powerful they were able to shift Eur out of its orbit to pick up the humans who now live there: the moms, who occupy the highest level of the social hierarchy; the middle kids and the low kids, and two A.I.s who had to subject themselves to life as humans in order to lead the group–the Big Moms. Chicka and his twin brother Omare, like all kids of the moms, are taken onto the frozen surface to see if any of them catch the attention of the Aurals. Omare is chosen, which is when things begin to fall apart.

I think I read this one the same day I read “Arkfall,” and the two novellas had a lot in common: small communities working to make livable an unforgiving, unfriendly environment; citizens bound by a society that evolved in order to keep the great work going. In “Sublimation Angels,” though, there are ominous forces at work, and at odds with each other: Big Mom, the AI-made-human who, along with her enforcers, keeps the hierarchy of the people of Eur in place; and the Aurals, whose motives for allowing humans onto their homeworld, especially with such rudimentary technology, are completely unknown. The puzzles of why are almost as fascinating as the details of the world and its society, and I think I would feel that way even if they didn’t play so neatly into the Thesis.

The God Engines, John Scalzi

Captive gods bound by iron circles power the ships of the Faithful: the gods debased by the one who in some ancient time was victorious over the rest. What isn’t powered by the God Engines is powered by faith–up to and including, possibly, the iron that binds them and keeps them from escaping to wreak bloody vengeance on the ships they’re forced to move across the galaxy. Captain Ean Tephe of the Righteous has been sent to convert a planet that may hold the last known people who have not yet been converted. Faith, like iron, has levels of power, and these unconverted carry the most potent faith of all. The Lord needs them in order to combat a new and powerful threat that must be subdued—a new god calling some of the weakened and defiled ones to it, and attacking the Lord’s dominion.

Here are some things I loved about this story, in no particular order. The significance of iron: capability (and, arguably, identity) are handed down from the Lord in the form of iron Talents worn by the faithful, and there are three types of iron used to control defiled gods: third made iron binds, second made iron wounds, single made iron kills. The Age of Sail conventions that survive on the god-powered starships. The questions it raises about faith, belief, duty, and calling. The absolutely deliciously dreadful ending.

So this wasn’t as much of an identity-themed week, although certainly these novellas didn’t precisely kill the Thesis. The way in which faith powers the universe of The God Engines, for instance, the social conditioning of Eur and Ben, debates on the subjects of morality and normalcy of “Act One,” and even the way in which Syms J. Thorley tries to save humanity by becoming Gorgantis the fire-breathing lizard and the ruined Lady Beatrice turns whoring into the ultimate act of patriotism. This was, however, the week of the Flippin’ Sweet Endings. Ambiguous endings, devastating endings, unforeseeable endings, horrifying endings. Just great endings.

And now, it’s 7:30 pm on March 28^th (although we’re having internet problems tonight, so I’ll probably post this tomorrow morning). I have two subway rides, one lunch break, and one day off before I have to be finished my reading, and here’s what I have left (pausing to count): five full-length novels and Avatar.

Full disclosure: I’m probably not going to make it to see Avatar, because I feel really strongly about finishing my reading. I’m pretty sure I can do it, but I’m not going to post on the novels until afterward. So this is where I leave you for now. But the Informed Nebula Voter Project will return! Here’s what you have to look forward to:

Nominees for the Nebula award in the Novel Category:

• The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade Books, Sep09)
  
• The Love We Share Without Knowing, Christopher Barzak (Bantam, Nov08)
  
• Flesh and Fire, Laura Anne Gilman (Pocket, Oct09)
  
• The City & The City, China Miéville (Del Rey, May09)
  
• Boneshaker, Cherie Priest (Tor, Sep09)
  
• Finch, Jeff VanderMeer (Underland Press, Oct09)

Nominees for the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy:

• Hotel Under the Sand, Kage Baker (Tachyon, Jul09)
• Ice, Sarah Beth Durst (Simon and Schuster, Oct09)
• Ash, Malinda Lo (Little, Brown and Company, Sep09)
• Eyes Like Stars, Lisa Mantchev (Feiwel and Friends, Jul09)
• Zoe’s Tale, John Scalzi (Tor Aug08)
• When You Reach Me, Rebecca Stead (Wendy Lamb Books, 2009)
• The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making, Catherynne M. Valente (Catherynne M. Valente, Jun09)
• Leviathan, Scott Westerfeld (Simon, Oct09)

Thanks for reading!

I’ll tell you this much: the hardest part about this is not getting the reading done. It’s actually getting the post written. I think I am discovering that I’m not a born blogger, and my time is running out. I’m really going to have to start moving faster on this project. But to put you out of your misery, since I know you’ve all been waiting with bated breath for the verdict after week two of the IVP: the Identity Thesis lives! Here are the finalists for the Nebula Award for best Novelette.

Actually, hang on. What, you may be asking, is a novelette? That’s a good question. According to Wikipedia, “the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula awards for science fiction define the novelette as having a word count of between 7500 and 17499, inclusive.” So that’s pretty simple. But for anyone who can’t immediately convert word count to a solid understanding of actual page length, I offer this alternative definition: these are works long enough to take me a subway trip from Bay Ridge to SoHo (on the local) and back to read, but short enough that Nathan doesn’t scowl at me too much when I print them out. Does that help?

“The Gambler,” Paolo Bacigalupi

Ong is a Laotian refugee to the US, a man whose father once tried to speak out against injustice and oppression by casting words into the world and gambling on the slim chance that they could do some good. Ong is a gambler of a similar stripe, although instead of posting physical calls to action on lampposts, he posts as part of a media conglomerate. Revenue is calculated in clicks and the measurable attention of the world’s readers, visualized as blossoming color on a map of the world. The imagery here reminded me of the board of the Game of Risk—the “journalists” of these conglomerates are like generals, engaged in a constant battle for territory. A successful post is like the opening sally of a battle: it must be followed up with supplemental content to hold what it has won. For Ong, the challenge is that, in this world, the popular content and successful stories are (not surprisingly) things like celebrity gossip and scandal. Ong, who wants to write about, for example, the imminent extinction of a butterfly, is in danger of getting fired; his content doesn’t generate enough clicks or subscribers. If he loses his job, he loses his visa. A colleague riding a particularly high-profile story calls in a favor for Ong, an exclusive with a beautiful Laotian singer.

Now, I’m new to the world of caring whether or not my name or my content makes any kind of impact on the world stage (and, obviously: no, silly), but this story just seemed way not at all like speculative or science fiction. It seemed way too current. Way too accurate. A man eager to bring meaningful news of meaningful events to the attention of the world could lose his job and his citizenship because the work he turns out doesn’t generate enough hits in the media maelstrom. And the only story that might generate the readership he needs requires him to trade his identity and his ability to try to impact social change in the world for fifteen minutes in the tabloids. In the world of “The Gambler,” you are what you create, and if what you create doesn’t generate notice, you are nothing.

“Vinegar Peace, or the Wrong-Way Used-Adult Orphanage,” Michael Bishop

Mrs. K— is forcibly removed to Vinegar Peace when Elise, her last surviving child, is killed in the War against Worldwide Wickedness. There she discovers a sequence of rooms that, according to the Orphanage’s orientation video, will enhance her stay: a Cold Room in which she discovers effigies of her dead family, carved from ice, that she is made to watch melt. The Arboretum, where comfort creeps through the trees toward her in the form of figures clad in de-saturated colors, one of which Mrs. K is to choose for her spiritual guide. There is the salon, where bereaved Orphans in fancy clothes mix cocktails and meditate on how well one is treated when one loses a child. There is the room in which she and a guest view Elise’s body, laid in state. There is the room in which she reads Elise’s last letter to her and learns that her daughter’s quest for approval from her mother included the possibility of dying a casualty of war like her brother before her. There is the chapel, where Mrs. K’s spiritual guide, Father G—-, administers a sacrament offering vinegar peace: a stale rice cake and a shot of vinegar from a syringe.

So, full disclosure: I have dogs, not children. I have not yet experienced that shift where suddenly, as an adult, you are defined by your existence as a parent. I can’t quite imagine it; I am still too selfish. But certainly, that’s what happens. My cousin has two kids, and although she has always been a fascinating, artistic woman, once she started having kids, they became What We Talk About with Mary. I assume this is what will happen when I have kids; they’ll be What People Talk About with Kate. Because that’s what happens when you become a parent. You’re defined by your kids and what they do. Unless you outlive them, as Mrs. K. does, at which point, you are suddenly defined by their absence. For most “wrong-way, used-adult orphans” of the real world, this would be an exceedingly personal shift—a change in their own perceptions of themselves and their place in their extended families. In this story, however, that identity shift is extrapolated outward to imply that, by outliving their children, these orphans have in lost or outlived their relevance to their country and society. Having attempted to propagate the species (or at least, to provide more raw material for the Worldwide War on Wickedness), they have no further use and can be shunted off to Vinegar Peace.

“I Needs Must Part, the Policeman Said,” Richard Bowes

The fictional Richard Bowes, while in the hospital for a near-fatal intestinal illness, finds himself being recruited by one of the entities that oversee the boundary between the living and the dead. Bowes was identified as a youth as having an uneasy relationship with life and death, making him uniquely qualified to join the ranks of the transitional spirits. In the process, the spirits rewrite—or threaten to rewrite—the narrator’s past, even as Bowes takes his time in the hospital to revisit it.

This was a story infused by memory, both real and false. It presents a tremendously surreal take on having your life flash before your eyes: the fictionalized Bowes sees it as a mental internet search taking place in one corner of his mind, all the time, and he’s pretty sure it isn’t all accurate. This fear is confirmed when the policeman of the title threatens outright to change Bowes’ past, or at least his memory of his past, if Bowes does not agree to become an angel of passage: to change who he was in order to force him to change his mind about who he will become. The story also makes concrete certain basic, very common fears. The hospital is a place of transition—the policeman tells Bowes, for instance, that the light dying souls walk toward at the moment of death is the combined light of spectral hospital monitors. A more beautifully troubling example (to me, anyway) is the simple, terrifying possibility that people who undergo anesthesia might come back in some way different than they went under. There’s a lot to muse on in this story, and a lot of thematic elements to be digested and discussed, but I’m going to stop there so I don’t go on too long.

“Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast,” Eugie Foster

A guild of artisan maskmakers crafts identities for the constituency of the ravishing Queen by building masks inlaid with oversouls. The crafted faces guide the citizens in what to do, and what to feel. Each citizen changes his or her identity by changing masks each morning and evening. If one murders the person who wears the mask of his/her spouse, at the end of the day the mask is the only casualty. If one is flayed while wearing the mask of a man doomed to die by flaying, he/she will wake up the next day and choose the next day’s mask. One may wish he/she had chosen a different face for the day, but he/she will do what that face must. Yesterday’s murderer is today’s devoted spouse, and tomorrow’s degenerate shopkeeper. There are no consequences beyond the destruction of the day’s mask and little, if any, personality beyond what is endowed by the oversoul of each crafted face…until the narrator discovers a secret organization bent on destroying the Queen’s society.

Ten or eleven years ago I wrote my honors thesis on language in early modern English drama. While you’re chuckling at the nerdiness of that, let me add that a whole section of it was on the idea of language as costume—both something to dress up and something to conceal or change identity. Language, as much as the clothes the players wore, signified who they were to the audience. These are the masks of Foster’s tale: they give structure to the society—a very specific structure created to maintain a near chaos of endless permutations of murder and sex—while both giving and removing answerability, identity, and anonymity to the citizens. Stellar ending, by the way. I’m pretty good at predicting what’s going to happen when I’m reading, but this one caught me totally unawares.

“Divining Light,” Ted Kosmatka

The story starts with a gun, a bottle, a rocky, wave-tossed beach, and a man who is past being able to tell the two potential ends he holds, one in each hand, apart. He is a troubled researcher in quantum physics who, following a breakdown, takes a last-chance job and decides to reconstruct Richard Feynman’s famous experiment demonstrating the dual nature of light: it behaves like a wave until it is observed, at which point it behaves like a particle. When the researcher decides to investigate what species are capable of collapsing the probability waves into a single reality through their observation, he sparks a devastating debate on the nature of what it means to be human, and what–or who–can and cannot affect reality.

This was the first of the novelettes that I read. Now, don’t ask me to explain the math, but I love reading about physics. I know about this experiment, and I caught myself the day I read this story lecturing—lecturing, really, and poorly—one of my coworkers on the subject, trying to explain the awful reality rift the narrator discovers. The logical progression from the narrator’s experiment to the practical use seemed inevitable. It was horrifying. And then came the second discovery, the second rift. Bam. Even worse. I’d have had a bottle in my hand for sure, if I’d been this guy. But stories like this are why I love reading about physics. There are strange concepts, strange realities, that seem to need only the slightest twist and extrapolation to push them into the realm of the fantastic. And even then…if the math is sound…are we really so sure it’s fantasy? (Don’t panic. There’s no math included. I mean, panic—but not about having to do math.)

“A Memory of Wind,” Rachel Swirsky

The moment her father, Agamemnon, promises to sacrifice her to Artemis in exchange for wind enough to sail the Greeks to Troy, Iphigenia begins to lose pieces of herself and her recollection. The story is written as a missive to her father, a condemnation as well as a plea for understanding, a litany of her last memories as she is carried to Aulis under the pretense of being married to the hero Achilles so that she can be murdered in the name of wind and war.

Oh, it’s beautiful, this one. It’s heartbreaking. Even as Iphigenia’s memories fall apart, they are restructured into clearer versions of themselves; even as she accuses her father of keeping her from ever being allowed to experience womanhood, she begins, for the first time, to see things as an adult, even if the only great understanding this brings her is that the adults around her are just as helpless and unsure as the children they (at best) fail to protect (or, at worst, sacrifice outright). Her recollection is fragmentary, and it slips further and further to pieces as the story progresses, giving it the quality of a dream: specifically, the way the memory of a dream has of falling apart even as the dreamer tries to relate its events. There is also the troubling helplessness of a sleeper, dreaming: the pervasive sense that nothing she does will alter the outcome. There are troubling meditations on what it means to be brave, to be a girl, to be powerful—and what being beautiful does and does not excuse. And, of course, what it means to be the wind. “Learn to be your own wind,” she begs her silent little brother, Orestes. “Will you? Will you, please?”

So yes, the thesis lives on. But in any great story, there are plenty of themes to extract. Today, my observation collapses this multitude into one. And because this post is already very, very long, that is where we shall leave it for now.

Next up: the Nebula finalists in the novella category:

• The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, Kage Baker (Subterranean Press, Jun09)
• “Arkfall,” Carolyn Ives Gilman (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Sep09)
• “Act One,” Nancy Kress (Asimov’s Science Fiction, Mar09)
• Shambling Towards Hiroshima, James Morrow (Tachyon, Feb09)
• “Sublimation Angels,” Jason Sanford (Interzone, Oct09)
• The God Engines, John Scalzi ( Subterranean Press, Dec09)

Oh, this project is shaping up to be a lot of fun.

Here’s my bit of full disclosure: my Twitter posts did not accurately reflect the order or days on which I read these stories. I read them all last week. I read them on the subway on the way to and from work. I read them on my lunch breaks. I read them walking home from picking up a bottle of wine one night, tilting dogeared and pencil-marked pages in whichever way picked up enough light to read by, walking slowly under streetlamps and faster in between. I read each one twice. And then I realized I’d gotten so carried away with my reading that I’d forgotten to tweet about them all. But in the process, I remembered how much I love short stories.

There’s something so elegant about the form; a good short story has the elegance of a well-constructed mathematical equation or proof. This is why I’m not good at them, and why I hope someday I can learn to write them: they are great storytelling, distilled. What takes me three hundred pages, these writers do in ten. What makes this even more impressive to me is this: these are fantasy and science fiction tales. There’s worldbuilding to be done, and there’s no time or space for pages of exposition and description.

So without further ado, let me tell you about the worlds I visited last week.

“Non-Zero Probabilities” by N.K. Jemisin

New York City, fraught with Signs. Adele has learned that, in order to pass with relative safety through the city, she must leave nothing to chance, must court good luck by every means at her disposal, must shield herself with as many personal talismans as she can layer on. In the Brooklyn through which Adele walks, the fact of the all-but-nonexistent chance of a train derailment only means it was bound to happen sooner or later–and when it does, even as she runs to help, Adele’s immediate response is a touch of contempt for the carelessness of the riders. While hundreds of thousands are planning a huge group prayer for the soul of the city, Adele’s neighbor, the person who first helped her identify the shift in the city’s fortune, simply shrugs. “A little more shit, a little less shit…still shit, right?”

What I loved about this story is that it felt so plausible. It just seemed to validate certain pervasive almost-beliefs I kind of don’t want to admit to having. On certain days, I absolutely know that whatever can go wrong is systematically going wrong, as if the universe was somehow out to get me. I’m not the only one, right? We cross our fingers. We pray. We fiddle with lucky necklaces, or rabbits’ feet, or lift our feet as we drive past graveyards. Some of us do these things and forget. Some of us do them and believe. The question is, how far to adapt? Where to draw the line? When has the effort of surviving stopped us from living?

“Spar” by Kij Johnson

A too-small life vessel, adrift and alone. Following a statistically impossible mid-space collision between a human ship and an alien craft, the sole survivors, a woman and a non-humanoid alien, are trapped in this tiny lifeboat. Its interior is just barely big enough for the two of them to fit, and they are perpetually, intimately intertwined. The woman’s world has been reduced to Ins and Outs: her body, the alien’s body, the tube that feeds her, attempts to communicate and attempts to read communication in the alien’s actions as the life vessel, the spar the survivors cling to in the vast ocean of space, drifts and drifts.

This story kind of frightened me. It raises the kind of questions I hope I never have to think about seriously. When there is nothing left to identify you as human, when neither you nor the thing that occupies the space with you can tell what you are, do you cease being human? If your attempts to communicate seem to come up empty, do you stop trying? If recollection of human life lost is pain, do you stop remembering and surrender to simple, primordial stimulus-and-response existence, even if it provides an only slightly lesser kind of agony? And can humanity lost be regained?

“Bridesicle” by Will McIntosh

A human-sized drawer in a dating center. Mira wakes more than sixty years after a fatal accident to discover that, since her health insurance covered storage but not revival, her only chance for another shot at life is a series of blind dates with suitors hoping to find their perfect mate–whatever that means–among the dead. If things go well, a suitor can be convinced to pay the costs of revival. If they don’t, the last thing Mira sees is a hand reaching for something over her head, a switch or a plug that returns her to non-existence until the next potential “date” shows up–which might be years or decades later.

This is a scary story too, in a different way. If we’re honest with ourselves, aren’t we all, on some level, afraid of the ramifications of not meeting someone else’s expectations? Aren’t we all, in some way, afraid of being left alone? Isn’t there always that part of us that feels that somehow our happiness is too dependent on what someone else thinks? Another bit of full disclosure: I am terrified of what other people think. All the time. On the other hand, I know if I don’t make someone happy, they can’t relegate me to cold storage in a drawer for sixty years. I know that the only person putting pressure on me to meet someone else’s expectations is…well…me. Still, only subtle differences separate Mira’s reality from my self-imposed perceptions–and, I suspect, the self-imposed perceptions of a lot of people.

“Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela” by Saladin Ahmed

The village of Beit Zujaaj, a withered and gray outpost in the middle of nowhere.  A brilliant young physicker from the Caliph of Baghdad’s court has been temporarily exiled here for protesting the betrothal of the woman he loves to a half-dead but very rich noble. The physician passes his days dreaming of the city and love he has been forcibly separated from until he is summoned to the aid of the wife of Abdel Jameela, the hermit in the hills who no one in the village will claim kinship with. He’s able to ignore the whispered rumors about Abdel Jameela’s wife until he gets his first glimpse of her cloven foot. Then things get really strange.

When I spoke earlier of the elegant efficiency necessary to build a world in a short tale, I was thinking of this story. The conventions of politeness and piety, clung to like talismans, that form the structure of a society. Evocations of scent, color, and sound: the local Shaykh has a voice like a snuffed candle. The physician’s lost beloved smells of ambergris and sweat. And each time the wife of the ancient, sour-smelling Abdel Jameela speaks, her voice conjures a different music, a different perfume. And the cure the physician is asked to undertake for the hermit’s wife is something straight out of Umberto Eco, or Jorge Luis Borges, both horrifying and miraculous at the same time.

“I Remember the Future” by Michael A. Burstein

An apartment in Queens. Abraham Beard recalls a lifetime of writing glimpses of the gleaming, space-age future he once dreamed of, while the future his daughter and grandchildren inhabit moves onward and away, increasingly frustrated with dreamers like Beard who persist in living in the past. Acting as mileposts are snippets from Beard’s work, from the 1950′s to the present: moments Beard slips into even as he tries unsuccessfully to relate to his daughter before she and her family move to California.

In the first of Abraham Beard’s stories, the one that opens “I Remember the Future,” two explorers of New Earth find a piece of paper (“That dead wood stuff you told me about? Made from trees?”).  It’s at once every writer’s nightmare and dream–everything you’ve done, lost in some forgotten library, that’s the scary part. But the idea that someone, centuries from now, will find it and deem it worthy of rescue, identify it as the voice of a lost civilization…well, that’s the dream. For Beard, the years that were supposed to be bringing him closer to the future he’d envisioned have only showed him how wrong were his predictions, how misguided his hopes. Beard’s own daughter, who once dreamed of walking on Jupiter, remembers a childhood of closed doors and a father who only wanted to talk to her about his stories. And then comes Abraham Beard’s last day on Earth.

“Going Deep” by James Patrick Kelly

The Moon. Mariska is thirteen, on the cusp of adulthood,  and has been raised her whole life, in the care of a registered father, to be a spacer (she is the clone of Natalya Volochkova, her spacer mother, who she has never met but who has finally returned to Mariska’s world). She has been paired with an appropriately compatible spacer boy, she has been physically and mentally prepared by specialized schooling since she was small, and her bedroom monitors her vital signs in case her body “goes deep” into hibernation before the right time. And she’s just a little bit bitter, as adult life looms, that everything seems so preordained. So Mariska does what any self-respecting teen, spacer or otherwise, would do. She decides to shake things up.

I think a lot of people who don’t read science fiction think it’s all about the technology and gizmos and aliens. What I love about sci fi (well, one of the things I love about it, anyway) is how beautifully it can demonstrate the idea that, no matter what advances we make, no matter how our ways of life change, certain things are going to stay exactly the same. Teens are going to feel trapped, are going to feel like they have no choices, are going to feel like the adults around them somehow failed to notice that it’s time to treat them like grown-ups. Things will change, but nothing really changes. Some things are part of being human–even if you’re a clone on the Moon.

These are stories about identity. They’re about what it means to be the man or woman who you think you are, or who you want to be: a writer, a futurist, a physician, a good Muslim, a father or a mother, a husband or a wife, your own person, a legacy, a love, a family. Free to choose. Alive, or just surviving. Human, or not. They’re about what it means to belong, or not.  They’re about how you maintain yourself, the person you believe you are, the way you want yourself to be–how you do that when the world you inhabit, whether it’s a city or a tiny life raft or a space exploration program, seems bent on turning you into something else. It’s about the things you do, from simple decisions made to extraordinary actions taken, to stay true to the person you know yourself–or want yourself–to be.

For each of the characters in each of these tales, from the nameless woman clinging to an alien as her memories become meaningless to Mariska, the teenage spacer clone struggling against the programming of her genetic code and the certainty of the future she didn’t choose, to Mira, who must convince someone that she is what he needs her to be in order to keep from dying again and again and again, to Abraham Beard, the man who spent his life dreaming the future into existence and whose future reveals itself to be everything he feared and nothing of what he dreamed. No sleek rockets, no colonies built on faraway moons by adventuresome men and women carving out a new world–just ones and zeroes, blogs and Power Point…and paper and ink forgotten and left to decay in the forgotten libraries of Old Earth. From Adele, whose existence is shaped by the changing fortunes of her city (at least along as she allows it to be), to the young physicker of Saladin Ahmed’s tale, for whom all things come down to belonging and being the man he is expected to be. Money, family, adherence to law and custom–without these, he is no one. Even Abdul Jameela, the hermit in the hills, must prove that he can change in order to truly win his wife. Love isn’t enough. Not on its own.

So I’m developing this “it’s all about identity” thesis, and we’ll see how long it stays relevant. Next up: the Nebula finalists in the novella and novelette categories! Here’s what we have to look forward to:

The Novelettes:

• “The Gambler,” Paolo Bacigalupi
• “Vinegar Peace, or the Wrong-Way Used-Adult Orphanage,” Michael Bishop
• “I Needs Must Part, The Policeman Said,” Richard Bowes
• “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast,” Eugie Foster
• “Divining Light,” Ted Kosmatka
• “A Memory of Wind,” Rachel Swirsky

The Novellas:

• The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, Kage Baker
• “Arkfall,” Carolyn Ives Gilman
• “Act One,” Nancy Kress
• Shambling Towards Hiroshima, James Morrow
• “Sublimation Angels,” Jason Sanford
• The God Engines, John Scalzi

It’s entirely possible this may turn into two posts, ’cause as I look at those lists, that’s a lot of stuff to write about in one. We shall see. More to come!

It’s Awards Season! Yes, I’ll be watching the Oscars this weekend, but I’m not really talking about that. March is voting month for members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). In May, the organization will present Nebula Awards to one exceptional short story, novelette, novella, and novel; the Bradbury Award to one film, and the Andre Norton Award to a young adult novel.

Last November, on the suggestion of a couple very nice gentlemen I met after a reading by Jeff VanderMeer, Geoff Manaugh, and Jeffrey Ford at Columbus Circle, I joined the SFWA and attended its  NYC reception.  There, I had the good fortune to spend a couple hours of my time there chatting with Sarah Beth Durst, so when the Nebula Finalists were announced last week, I was ecstatic to see Sarah’s Ice among those vying for the Andre Norton Award. Then I did another happy jig when I saw Malinda Lo’s Ash (Malinda’s a fellow poster on the Enchanted Inkpot), Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan (which I adored) and John Scalzi’s Zoe’s Tale (which has one of the best teen voices ever). Rounding out the list are the recent Newbery winner When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, Kage Baker’s Hotel Under the Sand, Lisa Mantchev’s Eyes Like Stars, and The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, by Catherynne M. Valente, which I think was only published online. I haven’t read any of those. Yet.

There were actually a lot of books among those up for awards that I had read last year and enjoyed, some of which I truly loved: Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch, China Mieville’s The City and The City, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, and of course, Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker. I’ve seen all the Bradbury nominees, save two. I’d read none of the short works on the ballot, though, and it occurred to me yesterday that, unlike, oh, any other literary awards being given this year that I’m aware of, I actually get to cast votes for the Nebula Awards. And I believe in being an informed voter. So here goes.

I’m going to get moving and read all the works on the ballot. I’m going to make sure I’ve seen all the movies, which means I’m finally going to see Moon, which I’ve wanted to see and somehow never got around to (Hooray! Of course it also means I’m going to see Avatar, which–don’t kill me–I haven’t felt any great desire to see). Because I’m going to be an Informed Voter. And I’m going to share the journey with you lot, if you’ll come along. I’m particularly looking forward to telling you about the shorter works, because if you’re anything like me, you just might not have them on your radar. I love short stories, but I’ll be the first to admit I don’t read them as often or as widely as I’d like, given the breadth and quality of what’s out there. And I couldn’t even tell you the difference between a novella and a novelette (but don’t worry, I’ll find out, and then we can all rest easy). I may not manage to post about every category before the end of March, but I’m going to do my best.

Before I sign off, though, I want to add (and I can’t say this loudly enough, so I will–pardon me–format the hell out of it) IF YOU ARE ELIGIBLE TO JOIN THE SFWA, YOU SHOULD. If I started into why, this would turn into an even longer post than it’s shaping up to be, so I encourage you to read more here. In brief, it’s an organization that works for you, the writer, through advocacy, communication, information, mentoring, even legal assistance and benevolent funds. To find out if you’re eligible, read here.

So, the Informed Voter Project starts today! Coming up next: the Nominees for a Nebula Award in the Short Story Category:

• “Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela,” by Saladin Ahmed
• “I Remember the Future,” Michael A. Burstein
• “Non-Zero Probabilities,” N. K. Jemisin
• “Spar,” Kij Johnson
• “Going Deep,” James Patrick Kelly
• “Bridesicle,” Will McIntosh

Stay tuned!

Nathan attempted to have me stop what I was doing to read the first chapter, in which Dr. Alimantando, while riding his wind-board across a great desert, is visited for three consecutive nights by a greenperson who claims he is there to lead Alimantando to his destiny. That’s how I knew this one was going to be good. I read the first few pages and gave it back. I was pretty sure if I finished the chapter, I wasn’t going to get any writing done that day because I’d sit and read the whole thing. When Nathan finished it, he handed it over and said, “Eh. Reminded me of One Hundred Years of Solitude. I lost track of the characters. But you’re going to like it a lot.”

It was a safe bet. He knows One Hundred Years of Solitude has been one of my favorite books for, oh, ever. And he was right. I loved Desolation Road, and it is just like One Hundred Years of Solitude, only on Mars instead of in Macondo. If there were mechanical angels in One Hundred Years of Solitude. And sentient trains. And a garden straight out of Jorge Luis Borges. And the Greatest Pool Player in the World. And a man who charms broken machines back to life. And a guitar player known only as The Hand, who calls down the first rain ever to fall on the town of Desolation Road with a red guitar.

So actually, there are several points of difference.

Basically, the idea is this: led by the mysterious greenperson, Dr. Alimantando finds himself sheltering at an oasis in the red desert. When his wind-board is swept away as he sleeps, Alimantando is trapped at the oasis, his only companion a dying, abandoned ROTECH environmental engineering module who wants Alimantando to shut it off and put it out of its misery. From the body of the module, Alimantando extracts enough material to build what will become the infrastructure of Desolation Road: a solar collector and a wind-pump gantry. And then, slowly, slowly, the little oasis begins to gather its people to it: Mr. Jericho, the Patriarch of the Exalted Families, who is fleeing across the desert to escape assassins; Rael Mandella, his father Haran and his pregnant wife Eva, attempting to outrun a dust-storm in a rail-schooner; the Mandella twins, Limaal and Taasmin, born seconds after Dr. Alimantando and Mr. Jericho rescue their parents and who are accidentally cursed by their father as he names them, one with pragmatism and the other with mysticism; Rajandra Das, a railway tramp with the power of charming machinery who wins the Great Railroad Lotto and passage out of Meridian on any train he chooses (but is not permitted to decline the honor). When the trains begin to recognize the oasis-turned town as a legitimate stop, Desolation Road becomes a collective of misfits, mystics, betrayers, time-travelers, stunt-plane flyers, even the occasional trio of clones.

This book, by the way, is the perfect subway read, because each chapter reads like a short story. It does cover the entire existence of the town from its birth to its demise, but I, possibly because I am just wired differently from my husband, did not have any trouble keeping anyone or anything straight as I read. It’s chock-full of just the kind of weird detailing that keeps me riveted (reference the above-mentioned examples), and it’s written in some of the most beautiful prose I have ever encountered. McDonald’s writing has just gorgeous rhythm to it, and it goes from hilarious to heartbreaking with devastating ease.

It is definitely a book for the pie-cooling cupboard that holds my most favorite favorites. If, that is, Nathan doesn’t mind my squirreling it away in my room rather than his. Even if I loved it and he just liked it, Nathan likes his books just so. I can appreciate that.

A couple days ago I was hauling home my most recent bagful of Amazing Stuff found at SoHo’s Housing Works Bookstore and it occurred to me that my used bookstore finds might make for some interesting posts. Here, therefore, is the first installment of Bookish Treasures, featuring the incomparable Sprocket, who likes to curl up with a good book so much she often finds it necessary to actually lay on or near them, especially if I am trying to take pictures.

AIRSHIP ANDY, OR THE LUCK OF A BRAVE BOY by Frank V. Webster.

Found this one while on a shopping excursion to an antique mall near Kansas City, Missouri, with my mother-in-law, Susie. Inscription reads: LEROY TATHWELL, CHRISTMAS 1928. Random sampling from Airship Andy’s Table of Contents: Tramping It; John Parks, Airship King; Jiu-Jitsu; A True Friend; and A Hopeful Clew.

Random sampling from the list of other Books for Boys available from Cupples & Leon Company, printed facing the table of contents: Tom, the Telephone Boy; Bob, the Castaway; The Newsboy Partners; Bob Chester’s Grit; Ben Hardy’s Flying Machine; Dick, the Bank Boy; and Darry, the Life Saver.

The Gentleman’s Letter Writer: A New Letter Writer for The Use of Gentlemen with Applications for Situations and a Copious Appendix of Forms of Address, Bills, Receipts and Other Useful Matter.

This was a Housing Works find. From the series of Routledge’s Household Manuals, which also includes The Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Letter Writer, The Commerical Letter Writer, The Ladies’ Letter Writer, The Lovers’ Letter Writer, and The Child’s Letter Writer.

In case you are not familiar with the very useful article that is a Letter Writer, here’s what you’ve been missing. It’s a little manual that contains templates for letters on every subject you could possibly need to write a letter about, including blanks to be filled in with the specifics of your particular correspondence. Here is an example: this is Letter LXXIV, Another, from One Single Man to Another from the three options given should one need to compose an Invitation to a Pic-Nic Party.

London, Aug 15th, 18–

DEAR —,–I am commissioned by Mrs. — to press you into the service for a pic-nic to —. You are requested to bring your cornopean, as — has volunteered to bring one or two who do a little in the musical way. Mind, the –th is the day, for you always forgot. So no more at present from

Yours ever,

(———)

To —–, Esq.

Random sampling from the Table of Contents: Clergyman, letter about rent; College, from a young man at Oxford to his father; Colonies, letters from; Matrimonial, warning against a doubtful match; Matrimonial, from a man-servant to a maid-servant; Gold-diggings, letter from. A very useful book, indeed. Also, it turned out to be an Oysterish book, in that it contained an additional treasure inside it, but I think I will save that for a future series on Interesting Things Found in Oysterish Books.

Wonders of Florence (the Medici Art Series No. 3) by Joseph Fattorusso.

From 1956. Another Housing Works find, another oysterish book. Pretty sure I found this one on the $1 rack. Beautiful glossy interior with lots of photos and a gorgeous fold-out map at the back.

This book and the Letter Writer have both started projects percolating in the  dusty back corners of my mind. Probably Nagspeake projects. I suspect Deacon and Morvengarde, the mail-order catalogue, carries plenty of Useful Books like these.

The Warlord of the Air, by Michael Moorcock

Just look at that cover. Is that beautiful, or what? Also it has that fantastic used book smell. You know that smell? I love that. Found this one at that same flea market in Missouri.

Geographia’s 5-Borough Pocket Atlas of New York: 90 Colored Maps, Complete Street Index (Manhattan/Bronx/Brooklyn/Queens/Richmond

This one was a Housing Works find. I’m a sucker for a good atlas.

So is Sprocket.

So that’s this week’s selection of bookish treasures. Here’s to the wacky stuff that survives in attics and basements and in the dustiest, most difficult-to reach shelves of a used bookstore. Seek it out and rescue it!

Velocipedes, patent medicines, phrenology, Winton motorcars, blues, psychotic harlequins, snake oil salesmen, electroshock, automata, an Edgar Allan Poe-quoting fortune-teller, and a contest of skill played at the crossroads against the Devil.

You’re wondering now, what is this list of weird, cool stuff?

It’s a list–a very partial list, mind you; it isn’t even a complete list–of weird, cool stuff in The Boneshaker.

At long last, things are happening. The book comes out in four months, and I’m starting to get emails and phone calls from contacts who have received advance copies. After one week of play, the Feburary Facebook Boneshaker ARCmania Game (today’s randomly-chosen exciting name) is in full, highly-competitive swing; at last count (and I am counting obsessively) 81 new members have joined The Boneshaker’s FB group for this contest (and I hope you all win). A whole bunch of people have showed up here at The Clockwork Foundry. I hope you’ll all visit often. All things considered, it seemed like a good time to tell you a little bit about the book and why you are going to love it when it shows up on your doorstep on May 24.

For a basic summary of the book, I will direct you to Powell’s (where, conveniently enough, you can pre-order it if you haven’t already). For this post, I have decided to list all the Cool Stuff that went into the story. If you like these things, you are probably going to like this book just on principle.

Cool Stuff that was percolating in my head in 2003 (or whenever it was that I wrote the first draft):

• Item: New Yorker article about the Jamaica Ginger epidemic of the 1930′s, referenced by various blues musicians as jake leg, the gingerfoot, and the old jake limberleg blues. In order to bypass Prohibition regulations that were intended to make the patent medicine called Jamaica Ginger Bitters (or jake) less drinkable, a pair of bootlegger chemists added a plasticizer to it that turned out to be a neurotoxin. (For clarification: patent medicines=cool and interesting. Net results of neurotoxins being added to them=not so cool.)
• Item: Horatio’s Drive, the Ken Burns documentary about Horatio Nelson Jackson’s 1903 cross-country drive in a Winton motorcar, accompanied by a professional bicycle racer-turned-mechanic.
• Item:  Les Automates (French-language photo-essay book about automata purchased at the Strand Bookstore).
• Item: A selection of old books of American folklore, including 3 on the subject of Jack Tales.
• Item: Ray Rupelli’s apartment, with Cool Stuff including but not limited to an antique dentist’s chair found on the street; a coffee table decorated with guitar picks; a piece of iron grate; and a Robert Johnson record, found (I believe) in a box of records cleaned out of some apartment and left by somebody, like so many treasures are, on the sidewalk for pickup on trash day.

So, percolating in my head that year: patent medicines, blues, the Devil at the Crossroads, bicycles and motorcars. Then I started commuting from Brooklyn to New Jersey, and listening to audio books. Which brings us to:

• Item: Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes (purchased as an audio book to keep me from falling asleep at the wheel while commuting from Brookyn to New Jersey).  I fell in love with Bradbury’s language and the dark wonder of Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, as well as the small-town setting of Green Town. (Although I can’t cite it as a Cool Thing That Influenced This Book because I only read it last month, Arthur Slade’s Dust is another wonderful story about a menacing traveling show that wins over a town, and the single kid to whom it falls to rescue everyone and everything he loves.)
• Item: The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman (also bought on audio to keep me from passing out while commuting). Lots of people feel really strongly about the His Dark Materials trilogy or about Pullman himself; some are fans, some aren’t. I’m not getting into any of that. I loved the books, but what I loved most was Lyra Silvertongue, Pullman’s fierce heroine.

So now, to the percolating Cool Stuff you can add: a diabolical traveling showman and a fierce young girl, the only person who can save everyone and everything she loves from Impending Doom:

The Diabolical Traveling Showman: Dr. Jake Epiphemius Limberleg, proprietor of and head of research for Dr. Jake Limberleg’s Nostrum Fair and Technological Medicine Show. Also in Limberleg’s corner are Willoughby Acquetus, Paracelsus Vorticelt, Thaddeus Argonault, and Alpheus Nervine: the Paragons of Science, four specialists in the arts of Hydrotherapy, Phrenology, Magnetism, and Amber Therapy.

The Fierce Girl: Natalie Minks, daughter of the town’s bicycle mechanic and the woman who knows all the weird stories about their crossroads hometown of Arcane. Natalie loves all things mechanical, the Wright Brothers, and the antique Chesterlane Eidolon velocipede her father fixed up for her, even though it’s a meanspirited, hateful, impossible-to-ride boneshaker of a bicycle.

Then there’s Jack, the green-eyed drifter with a carpetbag and a tin lantern, and nobody knows what he’s up to. Except for maybe Simon Coffrett, the man who lives in Arcane’s only mansion…but nobody’s real sure about that Rilke-quoting recluse, either.

Wow, that title’s so good you hardly need the rest of the post, right?

Just in case, here’s the deal: The Boneshaker has its own Facebook group, which I, fledgling newbie that I am, started about a year ago when I had zip in the way of updates and excitement to let people know about. Despite my staggering lack of content at the time, 181 people humored me and joined up. From now until March 1, this intrepid group of superhuman sweethearts are going to tell the world about this amazing book their sister/niece/forum buddy/critique partner has coming out, and the person who gets the most people to join the group wins an ARC. (And you saw how sweet the ARCs are, right? If not, please to read about it here.)

Are you on Facebook? Then you can play, too! Join the group, then refer your friends. Your recruits should write a wall post dropping your name. If you win, I’ll send you an ARC, and I’ll draw one of your recruits from a hat and send one to that lucky person, too. (To clarify: I’ll draw a name, not an actual recruit from a hat. No participation in actual hat tricks are necessary to win this game.) The fun ends March 1.

Thanks in advance, folks! Your assistance in this matter is greatly appreciated.