clubs and countesses
Kind readers,
It's been a good week for me as a writer and a terrible week to be a human in the United States. I'm going to focus on the good news here--North Continent Ribbon on the awards radar, an essay about Count of Monte Cristo retellings--as well as the traditional cat picture.
fun with awards
- North Continent Ribbon is on the longlist for the British Science Fiction Association awards!
- The Locus Awards poll is open, and anyone can vote. I'd be tremendously chuffed if you wrote in North Continent Ribbon in the collection category or "A Fisher of Stars" as a novelette.
- Nerds of a Feather put North Continent Ribbon and "Fisher of Stars" on their list of suggested Hugo reading! This is super flattering. One caveat: if you are a Hugo nominator, please be aware that they have the categories wrong. The collection squeaks over the line into novel length, and "Fisher of Stars" is a novelette.
lesbian space opera Count of Monte Cristo retellings
I like queer stories and space opera and nineteenth-century literature. Somehow, while keeping an eye out for books that combine these elements in various ways, I've stumbled across three separate lesbian space opera riffs on the Count of Monte Cristo. I wrote recently about two of them, Countess by Suzan Palumbo and A Fire Born of Exile by Aliette de Bodard, for the Ancillary Review of Books.
(The third retelling, if you're curious, is Spirit: The Princess of Bois Dormant by Gwyneth Jones. It's a late installment in her Aleutian series and probably not the right place to start reading her work--I'd recommend trying Divine Endurance, about a bandit in post-apocalyptic southeast Asia falling for an angelic but destructive robot, instead.)
a cat
Here's Gennoveus enjoying a recuperative stretch:
Hang in there. Let me know how you're doing.
--Ursula.