Season of Wonder
Edited by Paula Guran
ISBN: 9781607013587
384pp | $15.95

Wonders abound with the winter holidays. Yuletide brings marvels and miracles both fantastic and futuristic. Christmas spirits can bring haunting holidays, seasonal songs might be sung by unearthly choirs, and magical celebrations are the norm during this very special time of the year. The best stories from many realms of fantasy and a multitude of future universes, gift-wrapped in one spectacular treasury of wintertime wonder.

CONTENTS

Dana Cameron, “The Night Things Changed”
Orson Scott Card, “Wise Men”
Harlan Ellison, “Go Toward the Light”
Nina Kiriki Hoffman, “Home for Christmas”
Janet Kagan, “The Nutcracker Coup”
James Patrick Kelly, “The Best Christmas Ever”
Ellen Kushner, “Dulce Domum”
Charles de Lint, “Pal o’ Mine”
Robert Reed, “A Woman’s Best Friend”
M. Rickert, “The Christmas Witch”
Kristine Kathryn Rusch, “Loop”
Sarban, “A Christmas Story”
Ken Scholes, “If Dragon’s Mass Eve Be Cold and Clear”
James Stoddard, “Christmas at Hostage Canyon”
Evelyn Vaughn, “The Winter Solstice”
Connie Willis, “Newsletter”
Robert Charles Wilson, “Julian: A Christmas Story”
Gene Wolfe, “How the Bishop Sailed to Inniskeen”

John Shirley will be appearing this Saturday, July 7 at SF in SF (with Richard Kadrey and Terry Bisson) reading and signing Everything Is Broken and A Song Called Youth (and other books) at The Variety Preview Room 582 Market St. @ Montgomery in SAN FRANCISCO (1st floor of The Hobart Bldg.) Doors Open 6:00PM. Event starts: 7:00PM. It’s FREE! http://www.sfinsf.org/

The following Friday and Saturday—July 13 and 14—he will be in San Diego for ComicCon. On Friday, July 13, he’ll be signing books at the Mysterious Galaxy booth at 2 p.m. and will be on an IDW comics panel at 4 p.m. On Saturday, July 14 at noon he’ll be with artist Kevin Colden at the IDW comics booth, signing. There’ll be copies of the first issue of The Crow: Death and Rebirth (written by John Shirley there with art by Kevin Colden).

“Cartographer Wasps and Anarchist Bees” by E. Lily Yu will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2012 edited by Rich Horton. Gina Guadagnino interviews her on the story.

The careful structures of the wasp and bee societies are integral to this story. Can you tell us if it was those structures that inspired the story, or if they happened to fit the story you wanted to tell?

I must have been aware on some level of that long tradition of writers and scientists, Virgil to Bernard Mandeville to James Gould, fascinated by the parallels between eusocial insects in general and bees in particular—the hive, the swarm, the nest—and human political realities. Maurice Maeterlinck wrote a beautiful little book called The Life of the Bee, which I first stumbled on in epitaphs to Laurie R. King’s The Beekeeper’s Apprentice many years ago, and bought; it is a short series of meditations and observations on the beehive and its inhabitants that frequently take flight into philosophical wonder. He writes of the swarm:

Where is the fatality here, save in the love of the race of today for the race of tomorrow? This fatality exists in the human species also, but its extent and power seem infinitely less. Among men it never gives rise to sacrifices as great, as unanimous, or as complete. What farseeing fatality, taking the place of this one, do we ourselves obey? We know not; as we know not the being who watches us as we watch the bees.

I had studied some entomology in high school; then in my sophomore year at Princeton a beekeeping club was formed, and I began attending classes and hanging around the hives. (We just caught a small swarm on campus last Wednesday.) Somehow all of these things combined with a graduate course on postcolonialism and the deadline for the Dell Awards to make a whole story.

These are guesses. I’m waffling. There are some stories that come to you by grace, or by a neutrino hitting your brain, whose origins are unfathomable. This was one of them.

More: Read the rest of the interview here!

ISBN: 9781607013150

Kick out the jams with hot licks and fantastic riffs on rock and roll from the only kind of fiction that feeds the soul: science fiction and fantasy. Like rock, speculative fiction is larger than life, there’s no limit on where it can take you. Electrifying stories with the drive, the emotion, the heart of rock. Headliners, award winners, and rising stars take the stage with their greatest fictional hits. Find a place, grab some space…get ready to rock! Includes two original stories.

More information on our official page.

Contents (alphabetical order):

Elizabeth Bear, “Hobnoblin Blues”
Poppy Z. Brite, “Arise”
Edward Bryant “Stone”
Pat Cadigan “Rock On”
Lawrence C. Connolly “Mercenary” (Original)
Bradley Denton “We Love Lydia Love”
Elizabeth Hand “The Erl-King”
Del James “Mourningstar” (Original)
Graham Joyce “Last Rising Son”
Greg Kihn “Then Play On”
Marc Laidlaw “Wunderkindergarten”
Caitlín R. Kiernan “Paedomorphosis”
Charles de Lint “That Was Radio Clash”
Graham Masterton “Voodoo Child”
Alastair Reynolds “At Budokan”
David J. Schow “Odeed”:
Lewis Shiner “Jeff Beck”:
John Shirley “Freezone”
Lucius Shepard “…How My Heart Breaks When I Sing This Song…”
Norman Spinrad “The Big Flash”
Bruce Sterling “We See Things Differently”
Michael Swanwick “The Feast of Saint Janis”
F. Paul Wilson “Bob Dylan, Troy Johnson, and the Speed Queen”
Howard Waldrop “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll”

You can find the announcement here on her blog. We also now have an official page up.