Wednesday, December 17, 2014

I'm Not Afraid of Kim Jong Un! My Novel Has A Coup Against His Dynasty.


In today's startling, real world news, IT hackers sympathetic to North Korea's Kim Dynasty have caused Sony Pictures to withdraw its movie The Interview, a comedy about a plot to assassinate Kim Jong Un, by threatening violent attacks on theatres that show the movie.


But people of the free world, do not fret! My novel The Shrine of the Siren Stone is still available, and its plot includes a coup against the Kim Dynasty (chapter 4). Okay, it's just a subplot, but it's still offensive to Kim Jong Un and will get me banned from any science fiction convention in North Korea. That's not a big loss, though, because I hear the hotels have electricity shortages and there are no cosplayers there.
 
You can buy the book that dares to speculate on murder and mayhem against the Kim Dynasty from Amazon in the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere.

At Amazon Canada
At Amazon U.S.

At Amazon China
At Amazon Japan

 

Wrestling With Gods (Tesseracts Eighteen): "Mecha-Jesus" is the Lead Story

 
 
My story "Mecha-Jesus" is the first story in the anthology Wrestling With Gods (Tesseracts Eighteen), edited by Liana Kerzner and Jerome Stueart. This is the latest of the Tesseracts series of anthologies of Canadian science fiction and fantasy.
 
"Mecha-Jesus" is about a Japanese town that uses an android of Jesus as a tourist attraction at its Christ Festival, where the locals, none of whom are Christian, celebrate the life of Jesus, the Israeli rebel who escaped crucifixion and became a rice farmer in Japan.
 
Wrestling With Gods' theme is religion in science fiction, fantasy, and horror. The stories draw from a wide variety of inspirations. A sample of the stories includes the myths of cuttlefish, a vampire in residential schools, a Muslim woman who wants to get closer, surgically, to her god, the demons of outer space, the downside of Nirvana. Wrestling with Gods (Tesseracts Eighteen) take their faith and religion into the future, into the weird and comic and thought-provoking spaces where science fiction and fantasy has really always gone, struggling with higher powers, gods, the limits of technology, the limits of spiritual experience.
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At times profound, these speculative offerings give readers a chance to see faith from the believer and the skeptic in worlds where what you believe is a matter of life, death, and afterlife.
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The stories are by: Derwin Mak, Robert J. Sawyer, Tony Pi, S. L. Nickerson, Janet K. Nicolson, John Park, Mary-Jean Harris, David Clink, Mary Pletsch, Jennifer Rahn, Alyxandra Harvey, Halli Lilburn, John Bell, David Jón Fuller, Carla Richards, Matthew Hughes, J. M. Frey, Steve Stanton, Erling Friis-Baastad, James Bambury, Savithri Machiraju, Jen Laface and Andrew Czarnietzki, David Fraser, Suzanne M. McNabb, and Megan Fennell.


Wrestling With Gods is already available as a Kindle edition from Amazon:

Wrestling With Gods
Other e-book editions will be available in February 2015, and the print edition will be available in Canada in March 2015 and in the United States in April 2015.

There will be a book launch at the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation, and Fantasy in Toronto on Thursday, April 30, 2015. Stay tuned for more information.

Because the Kindle edition was released in 2014, "Mecha-Jesus" will be eligible to be nominated for the Aurora Award for Best Short Story for 2014. Please read it and consider nominating it for the Aurora Award.

Ricepaper 19.3 (Fall 2014): The Speculative Fiction Issue


Ricepaper, the Asian Canadian literary magazine, published its special Speculative Fiction issue (fantasy, science fiction, and horror) this month. JF Garrard and I were the guest editors. Contributors include Aurora Award-winning editor/author Eric Choi and Writers of the Future award winner Tony Pi.

The fiction line-up is:
"Tushuguan" by Eric Choi: trouble in post-apocalyptic Vancouver
"Woman in the Shadows" by John Matsui: a ghost seeks revenge after a night of sex
"A Spirited Education" by Tony Pi: a Soong Dynasty exorcism
"Designing Fate" by JF Garrard: when designer children go bad...
"Golden Fish, Golden Slippers" by Melissa Yuan-Innes: a Chinese fairy tale
"Sharp Teeth" by Melissa Yuan-Innes: someone has sharp teeth...

Also in this issue:
an interview with comic book publisher James Bade
"Finding My Way Back Home" by Lou Villahermosa: an article about the haunted trees and other evil spirits of the Philippines.

It's in bookstores across Canada, but if you can't find it, you can order it online for only $5:

http://ricepapermagazine.ca/19-3-issue/http://ricepapermagazine.ca/19-3-issue/