Tachyon Books

This publisher, specializing in short fiction, has been around for close to 15 years. But it's expanded tremendously in recent years, growing to put out ten books per year. Authors in the Tachyon stable now include the late Thomas Disch, Cory Doctorow, Peter S. Beagle, Terry Bisson and Charles de Lint among many others. Known for single-author short story collections, Tachyon has started making more of a mark recently with anthologies like Steampunk, The Secret History Of Science Fiction, Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology and The New Weird. A lot of the most challenging and thrilling short fiction today is appearing in Tachyon's titles, one way or another. You can read our interview with Tachyon's Jacob Weisman here.

Night Shade Books

Another San Francisco press, Night Shade has been around for a dozen years. The company originally published only about four books a year, but now puts out 30-35 titles every year. And now Night Shade is putting out books from the likes of Iain M. Banks, Jay Lake, Neal Asher, Kage Baker, Paolo Bacigalupi, Walter Jon Williams and Greg Egan. And just like Tachyon, Night Shade has made huge inroads into the anthology market, with anthologies like The Living Dead, By Blood We Live and Wastelands. They've also put out Jonathan Strahan's "best of the year" anthologies and the Eclipse series, which we've been following with much excitement. Not to mention Ellen Datlow's Best Horror Of The Year anthologies. They've recently joined forces with the award-winning small press magazine Electric Velocipede. You can read our interview with Night Shade's Jeremy Lassen here.

ChiZine publishing

ChiZine started out as a webzine called Chiaroscuro, publishing horror, dark fiction and weird-ass shit, a decade ago. They started putting out books in spring 2008, and already they're up to 12 titles a year. And judging from recent offerings, they seem to be upholding their proud tradition of freakgnosis and terror. Recent books include Katya From The Punk Band by Simon Logan, A Book Of Tongues by Gemma Files, Chimerascope by Douglas Smith and The World More Full Of Weeping by Robert J. Wiersema.

Edge Science Fiction & Fantasy Publishing (and Tesseract Books)

This indy has been around since 2000, and now includes Tesseract Books. They seem to put out a lot of horror, including the Tesseracts anthology series, but also a fair amount of regular science fiction and fantasy. One of their recent releases is the intriguingly titled Time Machines Repaired While U Wait by K.A. Benford. That seems to be a kid-friendly title, and some of their books, like A Petrified World, are labeled as aimed at children ages eight and up.

Subterranean Press

Specializing in the horror, suspense and dark mystery genres, this publisher puts out tons of books by Poppy Z. Brite, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Ray Bradbury and Kage Baker. Fans of Alastair Reynolds will need to track down their recent flipbook of two novellas: Thousandth Night (set in the same world as House Of Suns) and Minla's Flowers. Coming soon: The Best Of Peter S. Beagle, which looks amazing. They have a close relationship with Joe Lansdale, allowing them to put out limited editions of many of his books. Their limited editions, generally, are fantastic and often have great illustrations, recently including Dan Simmons' The Terror and John Scalzi's The Last Colony.

Golden Gryphon

Founded in 1997, this small press survived the death of its founder, Jim Turner, in 1999, and is still putting out books — including The Empire Of Ice Cream and The Fantasy Writer's Assistant by the great Jeffrey Ford. They also put out Nancy Kress' Nano Comes To Clifford Falls And Other Stories and George Alec Effinger's Budayeen Nights, plus books by Mike Resnick and George Zebrowski. Their website looks a bit like it was last redesigned in 1997, but their books are fantastic.

Damnation Books

I had not heard of this publisher until I started working on this feature, and now I'm utterly fascinated. Maybe it's the weird, off-beat nature of their books — like The One-Percenters, in which a society of serial killers goes around murdering those with weak genes, who are only being kept alive because of money and medicine. Or The Zombie Cookbook, a book of "stories, poems
and recipes" about cooking with zombies, or cooking zombies. (Eww?) Mostly, though, it's the way all of their books are rated (on a scale of one to five) for sex and violence, as well as reader response in some cases. Only one book has scored a "5" for both sex and violence: The Body Cartel by Alan Spencer. Other Damnation authors? Time to raise your game.

P.S. Publishing

This British small press has put out tons of award-winning titles, especially in horror and fantasy but also in science fiction. New books are coming up by both Stephen King and his son Joe Hill. They've championed the underrated horror author Ramsey Campbell, and published great authors like Gwyneth Jones, Stephen Baxter, and Graham Joyce. They also put out Postscripts, a quarterly anthology/magazine series edited by founder Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers.

Eraserhead Press

This indy press, started by Carlton Mellick III, keeps chugging along under the steady leadership of Rose O'Keefe and her gang. And they're keeping it weird: We saw a table of Eraserhead titles at World Fantasy Con, and were blown away by the sheer Dada-ness of it all. There's Mellick's The Faggiest Vampire, which is what it sounds like. There's Shatnerquake, in which the real-life William Shatner attends a convention and has to fight all the fictional characters he's ever played. (The cover blurb goes: "William Shatner? William Shatner. William Shatner!") But perhaps the best title actually is, Rampaging Fuckers of Everything on the Crazy Shitting Planet of the Vomit Atmosphere. How do you get any better than that? Like so many of the small presses on this list, they also put out a magazine, The Magazine Of Bizarro Fiction.

Apex Publications:

Like most of the small presses on this list, Apex also puts out a magazine — but the magazine, Apex Magazine, seems to be the biggest part of their publishing empire. They do also put out a number of horror/dark fantasy books, though, including B.J. Burrow's The Changed, which tells of a zombie outbreak from the zombie point of view. (The intriguing blurb goes, "It's not the end of the world. It's just zombies.")

Prime Books

This small press has been around since at least 2001, when they put out Catherynne M. Valente's The Labyrinth. Since then, they've put out books by KJ Bishop, Theodora Goss, Sarah Monette, Holly Phillips, Ekaterina Sedia, Jeff VanderMeer, and many more. And their books have made top ten lists from Amazon, Booklist and Publishers Weekly. Publisher Sean Wallace purchased the Prime Books imprint from Wildside Press, and relaunched it as a Recently, they've put out some great anthologies, like Federations and a forthcoming wizard-themed book (both edited by John Joseph Adams.) And they're putting out a new edition of Rudy Rucker's Ware tetralogy, with an introduction by William Gibson. A lot of the most interesting new books we've seen lately have come out from Prime. They also do their own annual Best Science Fiction & Fantasy anthology, edited by Rich Horton (full disclosure: I have a story in the new volume of this.) And they publish Fantasy magazine, which is now a webzine.

Circlet Press

Cecilia Tan started out putting out chapbooks of erotic science fiction in the early 1990s, with Telepaths Don't Need Safewords, which I still think is the best title ever. This grew into an empire of science-fictional smut, including the gay erotic SF anthology series Wired Hard and many other futuristic collections like Fetish Fantastic and Best Fantastic Erotica. These days, a lot of their titles are available at low cost as PDFs and e-reader volumes. If you've ever wanted to know how aliens and demigods practice safe and consensual BDSM, then these are the books for you.

Small Beer Press

Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link have been putting out quirky, wonderful and bizarre books, alongside their zine Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, for a decade now. I remember when the only places I used to see them were in the used bookstore on Newberry Street in Boston. Now Small Beer titles are among the most highly respected, and anticipated, out there. And they are constantly doing great good works: Like when Laurie J. Marks' elemental logic trilogy got canceled by its original publisher before the final volume came out, fans clamored to be able to read the conclusion — and Small Beer stepped in to save the day. Small Beer has also put out the great Interfictions anthologies of genre-defying stories, and books by Benjamin Rosenbaum, Elizabeth Hand, Joan Aiken, Greer Gilman and Poppy Z. Brite. And not to be shallow or anything, but their books are usually among the most beautifully designed out there, with arrestingly lovely covers.

Note: Before anybody pipes up in comments, we thought about including Pyr Books on this list — but they were launched as an imprint of Prometheus Books, a publisher that's been around since 1969. So through a painstaking process involving snake entrails, we deemed they weren't quite as much of an indy as the others on this list. If you disagree, blame the snake — but also, feel free to pipe up in comments. I also wound up leaving out Cemetery Dance, just becuase they've been around for 20+ years. Let us know if we missed your favorite indy press!

Top image: cover of Monstrous Affections by David Nickle, from Chizine Publications.

Set in the city of Ambergris that VanderMeer invented with his collection City of Saints and Madmen, the novel takes place after the once-oppressed "grey caps" have risen up from their underground ghettos and taken over the city. Mysterious and seemingly magical in previous stories, the grey caps are revealed in this novel - intriguingly - as bioengineers who can convert plants and animals into weapons, surveillance devices, superpowered implants, and even entire buildings. The city that was once run by industrial/colonial mafia-style companies is now entirely run by the grey caps, and our main character Finch has been enlisted to serve in their puppet police force.

VanderMeer is at his best when imagining the vast, alien, and yet strangely recognizable history of Ambergris. Built on the dead bodies of natives, then atop the oppressed grey caps' tunnels, and finally out of the imperial pursuits of warring companies, the city is like a puckered scar of historical traumas. Now its entire architecture is being rewritten by grey cap biotechnology, buildings evaporating into dust or rising up out of weird plants to form spongy, reeking structures. Half the citizens have been transformed by spore infections, converted into souped-up "partials" or simply killed by mushroom toxins.

The novel begins with ambiguous hero Finch investigating the extremely bizarre murder of a human and a grey cap, who appear to have been dropped improbably from a very great height onto a sofa in an apartment. Making matters worse is the fact that this investigation is being watched closely by his grey cap boss, who insists that he carry a spore gun that leaks weird fluids all the time.

Like any noir gumshoe, Finch finds himself drawn into a conspiracy far vaster than anything he'd imagined. With the help of his rebel librarian friend, and his spore-eaten partner, he discovers that the grey caps have a terrifying plan that involves two enormous towers they're building near the harbor. But he also discovers that there are insurgencies within insurgencies whose reach goes far beyond Ambergris' boundaries - possibly into other worlds. Finch's own family history connects him more deeply to the city's deep political structure than he ever realized.

Surreal and at times intoxicating, Finch is ambitious in a way that few genre novels ever are. VanderMeer has tried - and, often, succeeded - in blending fantasy, science fiction, and crime fiction into something delightfully evil and strange. He's converted the traditional hard edges of noir fiction into the foggy, fungal shapes of magical science realism. Especially when Finch is exploring Ambergris' new biotech contours, which inevitably lead into its industrial past, you get a visceral sense of what it means to discover that what you thought was magic was actually just advanced technology. This is a very difficult idea to depict using imagery and mood, but VanderMeer does it brilliantly.

There is a David Cronenberg feel to the universe of Finch, with its gooey guns and spore surveillance devices. But it's also a kind of Lawrence of Arabia story, which is what will keep you reading. You never quite know what sort of weird new narrative path you'll be led down, and that's exciting.

While the experiment of the novel is laudable, it sometimes fails frustratingly. The novel begins agonizingly slowly, which undermines the rapid pace required to tell a successful detective story. As if to make up for this problem, VanderMeer has written the entire novel in noir-esque sentence fragments that begin to grate on the nerves almost immediately. This is particularly tragic because so much of the author's charm lies in his lush prose.

While Finch may be flawed, it's ultimately a rewarding read. Even if you've never read any of VanderMeer's other Ambergris stories, it stands well on its own and is testimony to how mind-boggling and affecting science fiction can be when released from its usual cliches.

Bruce Sterling, interviewed by Slashdot's readers in 1999, says that what we think of as community in meatspace is actually a collection of complex infrastructure, and we tend to understimate how vital that stuff is:

Q: It seems that many modern science fiction authors see the future as a time when society gives up on "physical" community in favor of technology. (i.e ruined govt, city states, corporate martial powers, etc..) Do you see this as an amplification of the state of community in today's world, or is it simply a convenient literary device?

A: I think the physical community was a "technology." Irrigation canals, harbors, army barracks, police stations, cathedrals, factories, clocks, forks, running water, that's all "technology."

There are a lot more ruined governments right now than there are sound ones. That's not a literary device. Go try living under a ruined government. Moscow right now — it's about the most William-Gibsonian landscape you are ever likely to see.

And more recently in 2006, BLDGBLOG talked to Jeff VanderMeer about the biggest mistake that science-fiction writers tend to make in thinking about cities and their infrastructure:

BLDGBLOG: How do you achieve – or hope to achieve – believability in an urban setting, giving readers something that (they think) might actually exist?

VanderMeer: As a novelist who is uninterested in replicating "reality" but who is interested in plausibility and verisimilitude, I look for the organizing principles of real cities and for the kinds of bizarre juxtapositions that occur within them. Then I take what I need to be consistent with whatever fantastical city I'm creating. For example, there is a layering effect in many great cities. You don't just see one style or period of architecture. You might also see planning in one section of a city and utter chaos in another. The lesson behind seeing a modern skyscraper next to a 17th-century cathedral is one that many fabulists do not internalize and, as a result, their settings are too homogenous.

Somehow these two quotes, juxtaposed, feel like fruitful ground for some urban world-building. Don't understimate the weight of the past — and don't forget just how much complex technology has gone into building a physical community. Any city, especially a future one, will be littered with the debris of past community-building, and will most likely be broken in some fascinating ways. In other words: don't make your fictional cities too tidy, or you'll be left with a sterile planned community.

Moscow decay image via Seriykotik1970 on Flickr.

We were blown away by the second volume of Strahan's Eclipse series, not least because of Ted Chiang's Hugo-winning story "Exhalation." (At WisCon, I'm afraid I cornered Chiang and babbled inanely at him for five minutes about how great that story was.) But the table of contents for volume three actually sounds even more fantastic:

• The Pelican Bar, Karen Joy Fowler
• Lotion, Ellen Klages
• Don't Mention Madagascar, Pat Cadigan
• On the Road, Nnedi Okorafor
• Swell, Elizabeth Bear
• Useless Things, Maureen F. McHugh
• The Coral Heart, Jeffrey Ford
• It Takes Two, Nicola Griffith
• Sleight of Hand, Peter S. Beagle
• The Pretender's Tourney, Daniel Abraham
• Yes We Have No Bananas, Paul Di Filippo
• Mesopotamian Fire, Jane Yolen & Adam Stemple
• The Visited Man, Molly Gloss
• Galápagos, Caitlín R. Kiernan
• Dolce Domum, Ellen Kushner

That's a pretty incredible list of names right there. And yes, there do happen to be a lot of women on that list, including Karen Joy Fowler and Nicola Griffith — two authors we were just imploring to come back to science fiction.

Meanwhile, io9 contributors Jeff and Ann VanderMeer announced the table of contents for Last Drink Bird Head, their new anthology of flash fiction raising money for literacy charities, which will be available in time for the World Fantasy Convention. And befitting a book of flash fiction, there's a huge list of contributors, but it includes Gene Wolfe, Leslie What, Keith Brooke, Paul Di Filippo, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Tanith Lee, Jay Lake, and many others.

And finally, if you're tired of anthologies about vampires or zombies, then rejoice! Ekaterina Sedia, author of the masterful Alchemy Of Stone, is putting out an anthology of werewolf tales called Running With The Pack.

Here's the back cover blurb:

Remember the werewolves of old stories and films, those bloodthirsty monsters that transformed under the full moon, reminding us of the terrible nature that lives within all of us? Today's werewolves are much more suave and even sexy, and they moved from British moors to New York City lofts, shaved, and got jobs. But as the tales of these writers will show you, they remained no less wild and passionate, and they still tug at the part of our being where a wild animal used to be. RUNNING WITH THE PACK includes stories from Carrie Vaughn, Laura Anne Gilman and C.E. Murphy, and they will convince you that despite their newfound gentility, werewolves remain as fascinating and terrifying as ever.

Standing here, in the middle of San Diego Comic Con, it's easy to feel as though the movie industry is a huge maw — sucking up every stray thought or tingle of creativity that anyone has ever had, and mashing them all into new reasons for Brad Pitt to grimace. Hollywood feels all-consuming, when you're surrounded by hype for upcoming comic-book and disaster movies.

I was actually going to do a list of "gloriously unfilmable books," but then I Googled to make sure io9 hadn't already done that post. We hadn't, but SciFiWire, Screenhead and hard-SF writer Mike Brotherton all have. And after I'd already started writing this post, Wired Magazine did one too. (And io9 contributor Jeff VanderMeer and the CrazyMonk blog have great comments on the Screenhead post.) The unfilmable novels include some literary giants, like Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and Haruki Murakami, some masterpieces of thought-provoking science fiction, including Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, and Connie Willis, and some giant epics, like Gene Wolfe's Book Of The New Sun and Dan Simmons' Hyperion. I would add at least some of Iain Banks' Culture novels, some Joanna Russ, and a lot of Rudy Rucker's work.

(Incidentally, the movie of William Gibson's Neuromancer? Still definitely happening, according to inside sources I've talked to recently.)

So instead of doing a list of unfilmable novels, let's discuss the whole idea of a book being "unfilmable." First of all, is it true that there are "unfilmable" books (as opposed to books that shouldn't be filmed?). And what makes a book unfilmable? And finally, what do these supposedly unfilmable books tell us about the process of translating a book to film?

Jeff VanderMeer makes a really fascinating point in his response to the Screenhead post. He writes:

I also think this brings up a serious point: more novels should be unfilmable. Because this speaks to what about the form cannot be replicated in other art forms. When I was writing Shriek, one thing I had foremost in my head was to create something that couldn't be filmed (well, except for little excerpts of it...).

Yes, there are unfilmable books.

So is there such a thing as an unfilmable book? I'd say the answer to that is a resounding "Yes." Sure, people used to say Lord Of The Rings and Watchmen were unfilmable, and they were proved wrong. But those two examples don't disprove the existence of the unfilmable book, as a species. Some books are too abstract, too complex, too idea-driven, or too non-mainstream to become a Hollywood movie, or any kind of movie for that matter.

Take Rudy Rucker's Postsingular and its sequel, Hylozoic. They're fresh in my mind because I just read Hylozoic recently, and there's so much in those novels that you could never possibly convert into a series of sounds and visual images. You have the nano-machines, the "nants," devouring the entire world and porting everybody to a virtual Earth simulation called "Vearth." And after the nants are turned back, you have a kind of global awakening via a network of Orphids, machines which turn every object fully interactive. And soon, everybody on Earth is quasi-telepathic and able to spy on each other via the OrphidNet. And people can expand their consciousness by connecting to a kind of group mind called the Big Pig. Oh, and they create plastic self-aware robots called Shoons, and contact giants from another plane of existence (the Hibrane) who show them how to "unroll the Lazy Eight" dimension. I feel like I'm barely scraping the surface here, and any Hollywood scriptwriter would need a week in a sensory deprivation tank after trying to turn this into a screenplay.

We went to a reading and booksigning for Jacqueline Carey a while back, and she mentioned, with obvious glee, that her magnificent "Kushiel" books couldn't be made into movies. Partly, that's because of their huge scope and complexity — but mostly, it's because of the subject matter. Especially in the first three books, the main character is a sacred prostitute who can turn pain into pleasure (I'm oversimplifying a bit), and sex work and S/M are woven into the story so deeply, you can't remove them without the whole thing falling apart. Not to mention, the fact that her story takes place in alternate France that worships the bastard son of Jesus Christ, who teaches that you should "love as thou wilt," including S/M as well as homosexuality. There are many ways to make a terrible movie of Kushiel's Dart, but no way to make a good one — at least within Hollywood.

Some books just aren't visual enough to make good movies — take Le Guin's The Dispossessed. You could, I suppose, make a somewhat lifeless film about a physicist from an anarchist planet who travels to a capitalist one. But it would be missing everything that makes The Dispossessed brilliant, from its exploration of the limits and virtues of Annares' utopia, to its dead-on depiction of academic politics, to the investigation of physics and philosophy that lie at the core of the development of "simultenaeity physics." How do you make a compelling movie about someone coming up with a new way to think about space/time?

Watchmen and Lord Of The Rings, by contrast, are both action/adventure stories. They were already woven into the fabric of tons of other superhero and fantasy movies long before they came to the silver screen. Turning them into movies required a deft touch, to be sure, but there was nothing in either work that was antithetical to the needs of the movie form. (Except, possibly, Watchmen's giant alien squid.)

And novels that are even more unfilmable than the ones mentioned above also exist. Some of them aren't particularly great as books either — there are novels that are so dreadful, so dull, or so pointlessly offensive that you'd go mad trying to adapt them. I've read many of these books, so I know.

I should add a caveat: even if a book really is unfilmable, you can always make a movie with the same title and one or two character names, with nothing else in common with the original. If you include works loosely inspired by a book, then yes, anything is "filmable."

Are there books that can be filmed, but shouldn't?

As to whether a science fiction novel shouldn't be turned into a film, that's slightly more of a value judgment than the question of whether it can. Many people — myself included — argued that Watchmen shouldn't be a movie. In my case, I was groping towards the theory that a movie that was faithful to the graphic novel would be both too dark and too dull. I wrote:

I don't really doubt that we'll end up with a note-for-note mimicking of the graphic novel, transplanted to the screen. But will it be worth watching?... The Watchmen movie won't be able to duplicate the things that were awesome and juicy about the original graphic novel. And in its attempt to grasp at something that can't be captured, it may wind up being kind of boring.

Looking back at what I wrote, I'm not sure I made the case conclusively — I focused too much, in that essay, on discussing the things that Watchmen does that are unique to the graphic novel form, and discounted the possibility that the movie could do similar things in a different way. I didn't talk enough about the story itself, and the things about it that could, or could not, make for a good movie.

And then, a year ago today, I saw a bunch of footage and talked to Zack Snyder, and came around to the idea that his movie could work — it could be about the history of superhero movies, in the same way the graphic novel was about the history of comics. On the other hand, the actual movie that resulted really was a bit lifeless, as I'd originally feared — especially in the final act.

You'll find no shortage of novelists who feel their books shouldn't be movies, that too much would have to be sacrificed to the crudeness of the movie form.

But actually, thinking about it some more, I think it's a lot harder to argue that something shouldn't be filmed than that it can't be. If you're going to argue that it's possible to make a movie of your favorite book, but too much would be lost in the adaptation, you're shouldering the burden of proof. You have to identify just what elements would be lost — and make a stab at understanding how a work gets ported from "book" to "movie."

What does the process of adapting a novel to films tell us about movies and books?

Much of what Alan Moore said, in arguing that Watchmen shouldn't become a movie, is true of all printed works. You read a book at your own pace, with the ability to flip back and forth as you notice connections between things that happened in the previous chapter and things that are happening now. You do much more of the work of imagining the world in your head — even if there are illustrations. The book is frozen; the reader moves. It's the opposite of a film, in a sense.

I think people who believe that any novel that's brave, or complicated, or emotionally rich, will automatically make for an unfulfilling movie are slightly selling the medium of film short. You can do a lot in visual shorthand in movies, and there's a lot more scope to convey information in a way that will go over the heads of some viewers but resonate with others. Any film worth its photons works on multiple levels, for different audiences. A decent actor can convey a whole chapter's worth of backstory with a meaningful look.

Maybe, when adapting a book to a movie, there's something like T.S. Elliott's "objective correlative": you can put in visual cues, props and hints that stand in for complicated ideas and emotions inside a book.

My favorite book-to-film projects include Adaptation, which takes Susan Orlean's introspective work of journalism The Orchid Thief and turns it into a bizarre pomo story of two screenwriter brothers struggling with an inscrutable story. And then there's American Splendor, the film which adapts Harvey Pekar's autobiographical comics the only way you could: with a mixture of documentary and reenactment, with the two crossing over in a surreal fashion.

Of course, both of those movies experiment with the movie format to try and do justice to a quirky, unusual book. It's hard to imagine a science fiction movie doing something similar, unless it was a low-budget indie like Primer or Moon. Certainly, the kind of big-budget movie that a book like, say, Neuromancer demands is not going to support much in the way of stylistic experimentation. But maybe there are other ways of doing what those films do — bringing in some of the metatextual quirks of the books by adding a narrative voice-over, say, or a Verhoeven-esque set of fake commercials.

But really, that brings us to the biggest problem with adapting movies to books — big-budget Hollywood film genres are much more restrictive than book genres, at least right now. You have superhero films, disaster films, space-horror films and the occasional space opera. But that can always change — it was only a decade ago that you could count the number of satisfying superhero films on one hand, and now it's the "it" genre.

So maybe instead of hoping that your favorite book never becomes a movie, you should hope it does — and in the process of being filmed, it expands, just a bit, the circumference of Hollywood's narrow sphere of possibility. After all, it never hurts to be optimistic.

The SharedWorlds project sends teens on a two-week camp focusing on science fiction and fantasy, at Wofford College in South Carolina. Assistant director and instructor (and io9 contributor) Jeff VanderMeer curated the discussion, asking the authors, "What's your pick for the top real-life fantasy or science fiction city?"

Those four authors listed above, plus Elizabeth Hand, weighed in, and the evocative descriptions will make you want to dust off your passport and go traveling. The five chosen cities couldn't be more different from each other — some (like London) are shiny and high-tech, others (like Venice) are ancient and crabby.

In the process, you learn a lot about what each author considers fascinating about cities. Le Guin and Moorcock both seem to find the weight of history, settling onto a city or driving it into the ground, compelling and fecund with storytelling possibilities. Miéville seems to find London's lack of planning, its crazed ad-hoc development, exciting. Nalo Hopkinson finds Kingstown's mix of high and low technology, cobbled together, to be futuristic in a William Gibson-esque way. And then there's Hand's forceful argument that Reykyavik is like an outpost on an alien world.

Most fascinating of all? No cities in the United States — and none in Asia, either. I would have expected somebody to reach for Shanghai or Mumbai, which are being touted as the most "futuristic" cities by many observers. My personal pick? Hong Kong. I lived there for many years, and its crazily shifting landscape (buildings constantly being torn down, put up, torn down again, and tons of bizarre business schemes blossoming all over) felt like a future megacity at times.

The full list, with each author's comments, is well worth checking out. [Shared Worlds]

Conjunctions #52, out now, has a theme of "Betwixt The Between: Impossible Realism," and here's the description:

Postfantasy fictions that begin with the premise that the unfamiliar or liminal really constitutes a solid ground on which to walk.

No, I don't know what that means either. I guess it's something to do with the idea that the standard fantasy trope - the dreamlike realm, in which the protagonist learns that everything is weirder and brighter than he/she realized - is actually more "solid" than reality. Or something. In any case, who really cares, when we're getting literary "postfantasy" from Joyce Carol Oates, io9 contributor Jeff Vandermeer, and Elizabeth Hand... plus a selection from China Miéville's new novel The City And The City? Can't wait to get my hands on this. [Conjunctions, Thanks Michelle!]

Here's a description of the program:

Shared Worlds, an innovative two week workshop in fantasy and science fiction worldbuilding is currently seeking applications for attendance from students grade eight to twelve who have an interest in creative writing and fantasy worldbuilding.

The program is held from July 19 through August 1 on the campus of Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC, and offers an intensely creative atmosphere in which students learn all aspects of building their own fictional world through instruction in creative writing, history, art, philosophy and physics and then apply that knowledge by creating fiction, games and more.

This year's instructors include assistant director and two time World Fantasy Award winning author Jeff VanderMeer, Weird Tales fiction editor Ann VanderMeer, role playing game designer Will Hindmarch, Spiderwick Chronicles creator Holly Black and New York Times bestselling author Tobias Buckell, plus Wofford College's own Dr. Christine Dinkins, philosophy professor, and Jeremy Jones, lecturer and camp director.

Although the emphasis of this think tank for teens is on fantasy, according to Jeff VanderMeer the things that the participants learn will be very useful in real life.

"This really is a unique opportunity for talented teens to mix having fun and flexing their imaginations with developing skills that will serve them well no matter what they decide to do with their lives."

Tuition is $2,250 and includes room, board, instruction and all needed program material. Students who pay in full before May 1st will receive a discount of $250. A limited number of partial scholarships ($500) are available.

Find out more here. Hurry up and enroll now!

VanderMeer, author of the celebrated City of Saints and Madmen and most recently of a swashbuckling Predator novel, has gotten through about 14 of the 60 books in Penguin's Great Ideas series and it's already making him really depressed.

After Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Women" - a depressing book about the state of women's rights in eighteenth century England by Mary Shelley's freethinking, freeloving mother - he had to delve into even more horrific territory. Vandermeer tackled William Hazlitt's "On the Pleasures of Hating." Each day, after completing the book, VanderMeer writes a blog post about it containing a key quote, a cogent summary of the author's argument, and a few personal conclusions he's drawn from it.

It's an incredibly cool intellectual exercise, and for those of us who don't want to slog through 60 books of great philosophy his posts are a fun introduction to important thinkers. Next up, he'll be tackling the woes of the world with "The Communist Manifesto" and then Schopenhauer's "On the Suffering of the World."

Ultimately I think VanderMeer's experiment is proof that rich, difficult works of philosophy are just as important to the scifi author's intellectual life as science journals and novels are.

Read VanderMeer's 60 in 60 experiment as it unfolds on his blog, Ecstatic Days.

ldevitt:

An Alien and a Predator are forced to live together in a small house in the suburbs. The great bathroom commercial can be a promo for the new not-buddies comedy. Predator is sick of Alien building resin hives in the living room and Alien is tired of Predator killing and taking trophies from any one alien brings home.

GuardianOfChaos:

Aliens vs Predator: Omega
A visual book with only a narrative story about a hunter's last hunt. The story would follow an aging predator on a final alien hunt on a very harsh arctic planet. The Predator is scarred and carries many battle trophies on his armor. Throughout the story we are gifted with great views of the lone predator traversing a wide empty landscape symbolizing his solitude at the end of the road. He battles scattered aliens on the way to a hive and with each fight he comes off more fatigued and injured as he struggles with combat and his age. The book culminates with his final assault on the inner sanctum's of the hive and a battle with the Queen. During the fight some younger Predator's show up and simply watch the fight playout. In this hunter society there is no honor in a death that is not in glory and of battle. We watch as the battle comes to a draw in both the Queen and the predator's deaths. The young predators bury the fallen warrior with a champions funeral pyre atop the burning remnants of the hive.

ThomasInaMarten:

A Predator returning from a hunt on a distant world is tasked with eliminating a rogue Predator that is breaking the rules of the hunt by attacking anything in its path, even if it cannot fight back. The rogue Predator, roaming around in Austin, Texas, attracts the attention of the US black ops group tasked with capturing Predators, forcing the second Predator to fight not only the rogue, but well equipped teams of commandos hell bent on capturing both Predators. After dealing with a human trap and killing the rogue Predator, the hero Predator leaves a parting gift for the commandos who tried to capture him: an EM pulse that ruins most electronic systems in the city. After dropping off the body of the rogue Predator, the hero Predator goes off on another hunt somewhere in the galaxy...

Arachnophilia:

1) ripley's dead, lets leave her alone. please, for the love of god, no more character resurrections to keep the series going. find new characters — i'd love to see sigourney stay involved, but leave the character dead.

2) the alien chasing people through dark coridors has been done to death. what made aliens a good movie is that it completely changed genre from the first movie. alien 3, while a decent film (in the director's cut version), wasn't all that exciting because it basically rehased the first movie, with the sexual innuendo replaced with religious innuendo. so if we're gonna make a good one, let's really change it up and not try to be like any other alien movie before.

so here's the premise. the film opens on earth, and it's absolutely devastated. we are approximately 30 years after the aliens first arrived, via the company's finally successful attempts to capture and research a sample. and now, every alien on earth is dead, save one. it has been a long and hard war, and one that humanity has won in a manner very similar to hg well's "war of the worlds." because the aliens pick up host DNA, each rapid and successive generation partially hybridizes more and more with the host species, before it reproduces and dies off. the alien corpses that litter the streets are pink and fleshy, with shorter heads and smaller stature than we are used to seeing. they have been defeated by genetic abnormality, and compatibility with human immunodeficiency disease: they caught something very much like aids. all is looking up for humanity, until a forgotten relic shows up just past the outter rim: a strange u-shaped spacecraft, moving very slowly and leaving a trail of ghost ships in its wake.

now the planet must turn to the remnants of the weyland-yutani bioweapons division, and one of their scientists' pet alien for salvation. the origin and function of the aliens as biological warfare and planetary colonization need to be examined in light of the reappearance of the ancient ship at the edge of the solar system — that might be coming with a much more dangerous "pure" form of alien ready to devastate earth all over again. can we turn the aliens on their creators, without again destroying the planet in the process?

Congrats, winners! All of you get a free copy of Jeff's new novel, Predator: South China Sea.

Program director Jones said:

Take a minute to imagine this: you're fourteen years old. You spend all your free time reading books. Suddenly, you find yourself sitting in a college classroom with a bunch of other people who like to read science fiction and fantasy, too. There's a philosophy professor and a college theater major sitting off to the side. A two-time World Fantasy Award winning author is over in the corner taking notes and pitching in every now and then. The girl to your left is drawing a walking plant and the guy to your right is trying to explain how you can't have an ovular-shaped planet because of gravity. Someone else is explaining how the energy force "leaking" into your world from another dimension has altered the shape of the planet, defied gravity, and encouraged the plants to evolve into sentient and mobile creatures. Sounds exhilarating, doesn't it?

And VanderMeer added:

These kids worked their butts off the entire time and just did a phenomenal job. I mean, create a world in one week? And then write about it? A huge challenge, and yet they seemed to enjoy it so much they didn’t want to leave. One thing I really liked doing was bringing twenty “artifacts” from our house, ranging from an old Romanian medal to an Egyptian-looking statue to a jewelry box with a tiny boat in it, and giving them out on the first day. Then, as they created their worlds they had to figure out how that artifact fit in—who owned it, who made it, what was the story behind the piece. Some had a bigger challenge than others, but the next week when we sat down and they told me what their artifact was, they all had created amazing stories. All kinds of subtle motivation, ingenious solutions. It was very satisfying, and they had a lot of fun—and were happy they got to keep their artifacts afterwards.

Find out more on the SharedWorlds site.

Jeff VanderMeer, author of City of Saints and Madmen (and, with Ann VanderMeer, a columnist for io9):

The main difference is that science exists and magic doesn't. Even though everything in a novel is made up in a sense, this still matters—it creates different responsibilities. If, for example, the physical laws of a fantastical or SF world are different than our world, there has to be some explanation, no matter how off-the-cuff. And if that world contains magic, I think the writer has to be even more rigorous in thinking out how magical systems work, no matter how much of that appears in the text. This is because we are used to constraint. We are worlds of blood-and-water existing within a larger but finite network of people and settings, and all of that is constrained by the egg-yolk that is the Earth. If even something as arbitrary and recent as a sonnet suffers from constraint, then magic can be no different.

Of course, if you're a surrealist or absurdist, you often don't care about the difference between science and magic because the boundary between the two is going to be trampled and gleefully pissed on anyway. As well it should. Nothing is more annoying than allowing a little reality ruin your fun. If you have the imagination to get away with it.

Or, if you're Jack Vance, you just set your stories far enough in the future that the science seems like magic and you sit back in your golden throne, fold your arms, and cackle like either a mad scientist or a crazy sorcerer—take your pick.

One reason I have no magic in most of my fiction is that I cannot believe in it and thus cannot write about it in any convincing way. This is the same reason you do not find unicorns in my fiction. Or Smurfs. Or Republicans. I can and do, however, believe in huge intelligent squid ponderously pulling themselves through the alleys of a weird city, protecting themselves with helmets full of water. I can also believe in nefarious mushroom-based intelligent life forms living in bizarre underground caverns. However, since this is merely an audacious application of current theory on biology and biological systems it amounts to perfectly good science.

Elizabeth Bear, author of New Amsterdam and Dust:

That's a really interesting question, especially since for both SF and fantasy, I tend to lift my "rules"—whether that means the laws of physics or the laws of magic—from outside sources. Basically, in terms of writing—science fiction or fantasy—science and magic both serve (for me) to form a framework upon which I can hang the rest of the story. They're a structural element. So I try to find the coolest bits of either than I can.

Stephen Hunt, author of Court of the Air:

A fantasy author creates a monster by having a character in robes of any colour mumbling a spell, whereas the rules clearly state a science fiction writer has to put the character in white robes only, and have them mumbling something about genetic engineering and how at termination of protein synthesis, type I release factors promote hydrolysis of the peptidyl-transfer RNA connection in reaction to recognition of a stop codon. For the average reader, though, these both seem equally magic.

Ted Chiang, author of Stories of Your Life and Others:

Roughly speaking, if you can mass-produce it, it's science, and if you can't, it's magic. As an example, suppose someone says she can transform lead into gold. If we can use her technique to build factories that turn lead into gold by the ton, then she's made an incredible scientific discovery. If on the other hand it's something that only she can do, and only under special conditions, then she's a magician. And I don't mean that she's a charlatan; she might actually be able to transform lead into gold. But scientific phenomena are reproducible by other investigators; they aren't dependent on a specific person.

Electricity might have seemed magical at one time in history, but it works for everyone; you don't need to have an innate talent or be descended from someone special for a light bulb to turn on which you flip a switch. It took the work of very smart people to get us to the point that we can all use electricity, but none of them were magicians, precisely because they were able to make their discovery work for everyone.

To go on at slightly greater length, the reason magic can't be mass-produced is that it usually relies on some subjective quality of the practitioner: her intense concentration, her spiritual purity, something that can't be substituted with another person or with a machine. Magic is, in a sense, evidence that the universe knows you're a person. When people say that the scientific worldview implies a cold, impersonal universe, this is what they're talking about. Magic is when the universe responds to you in a personal way.

China Miéville, author of Perdido Street Station and Un Lun Dun:

What is the difference between science and magic? In real life, loads. In SF, I think the question's misleading, because I think that whatever SF may think and claim, and however much individual books may justly pride themselves on scientific accuracy, fundamentally the genre is not predicated on 'real' science at all. It's about apparently authoritative use of supposed scientific language, or, to put it another way, bullshitting. And that is not (necessarily) a dis.

There you have it, dear readers. What do you think?

Jeff sent over a description of the program that reads, in part:

Guided by course instructors and guest authors, students will design their own imaginary worlds, learning the art of creative writing in a dynamic "hands on" fashion. In addition to helping oversee the program, VanderMeer will also teach during the two-week period. "As far as I can tell," said VanderMeer, "this is one of the only programs of its type in the country. It's an exciting catalyst for energizing young people to use their imaginations in a creative and mind-expanding ways. Director Jeremy Jones has put together a really wonderful program that's also a lot of fun, and I expect to learn a lot from the students, as well."

There are still slots open, and you can find out more about signing up at the link below.

Shared Worlds [via Wofford College]

Here's Ambergris nightlife, created by Francois Baranger, featuring toothy worms. Top image of bugs by Vladimir Kush; image of giant worm and brooding house by Francois Baranger.

VanderMeer images via Dark Roasted Blend.

Here's an excerpt:

How It Began: Degradation of Existing Processes

My Manager was extremely thin, made of plastic, with paper covering the plastic. They had always hoped, I thought, that one day her heart would start, but her heart remained a dry leaf that drifted in her ribcage, animated to lift and fall only by her breathing. Sometimes, when my Manager was angry, she would become so hot that the paper covering her would ignite, and the plastic beneath would begin to melt. I didn't know what to say in such situations. It seemed best to say nothing and avert my gaze. Over time, the runneled plastic of her arms became a tableau of insane images, leviathans and tall ships rising out of the whorling, and stranger things still. I would stare at her arms so I did not have to stare at her face. I never knew her name. We were never allowed to know our Manager's name. (Some called her their "Damager," though.)

The trouble at work began after I came back from a two-week vacation at my apartment in the city, for this is when my Manager changed our processes. For as long as I could remember, the requests for the beetles we made came to Leer, my supervisor. I had made beetles for almost nine years in this way, my office carpet littered with their iridescent carapaces, the table in the corner always alive with new designs and gestation. However, when Scarskirt was hired to replace Mord, who had moved to Human Resources, we no longer followed this process.

Worried, I pointed this out to Scarskirt during the brief interlude when I taught her how to make her own beetles. She just laughed and said, "Maybe a change is good. We all do such good work, it shouldn't matter, right?"

I should note that "Leer," "Scarskirt," and "Mord" are not their real names. And all three were flesh-and-blood like me when I first knew them. Leer looked a little like a crane, and I had counted her as a friend, just as Mord had been a friend before his move. Scarskirt, though, stared at reflective surfaces all day and flattered so many people that I was wary of her.

After I came back, I found that Leer and Scarskirt shared an office and did everything together. Now, when the requests came in, all three of us were notified and we might all three begin work on the same project.

I remember coming into one meeting with the Manager, holding the beetle I had just created in my office. It was emerald, long as a hand, but narrow, flexible. It had slender antennae that curled into azure blue sensors on the ends, its shining carapace subdivided in twelve exact places. The beetle would have fit perfectly in a school child's ear and clicked and hummed its knowledge into them.

But Scarskirt and Leer had created a similar beetle.

My Manager immediately thought it was my fault, and erupted into flame.

Leer stared at Scarskirt, who was staring at the metallic table top. "I thought we talked to you about this," Leer said to me, still looking at Scarskirt.

"No, you didn't," I said, but the moment belonged to them.

My Manager forced me to put my beetle in my own ear, a clear waste, and an act that gave me nightmares: of a burning city through which giant carnivorous lizards prowled, eating survivors off of balconies. In one particularly vivid moment, I stood on a ledge as the jaws closed in, heat-swept, and tinged with the smell of rotting flesh. Beetles intended for the tough, tight minds of children should not be used by adults. We still remember a kinder, gentler world.

After this initial communication problem, the situation worsened.

Download the complete novel [PDF].

I love this design, with its webby typewriter look and abstract expressionist mutant. Here's a quick summary of VanderMeer's surreal tale:

Shriek: An Afterword relates the scandalous, heartbreaking, and horrifying secret history of two squabbling siblings and their confidantes, protectors, and enemies. Narrated with flamboyant intensity and under increasingly urgent conditions by ex-society figure Janice Shriek, this afterword presents a vivid gallery of characters and events, emphasizing the adventures of Janice's brother Duncan, a historian obsessed with a doomed love affair and a secret that may kill or transform him; a war between rival publishing houses that will change Ambergris forever; and the gray caps, a marginalized people armed with advanced fungal technologies who have been waiting underground for their chance to mold the future of the city.

Fungal observations [Feuilleton]