Women and Gender Roles in Dark Fiction

3-4pm Saturday
Molly Tanzer, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Scott Connors, Robert Price

How did HPL portray women and gender roles in his fiction and has horror evolved its characters since then?

Editors of Crawling & Cosmic Horror – new zines & anthos

4-5pm Sunday
Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Ross Lockhart, Jeff Burk, E. Catherine Tobler, James Beach

Editors share their experience and expertise about shaping collections of things both alike and yet not, the biz, and the slushpile. (Not a pitch session, bar is down the street.)

I will also be at the VIP reception and lurking around the conference. In other news, I’ve been asked to be the Editor Guest of Honour at Keycon 2013 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. I still don’t have an agent for my magic & music novel set in 1980s Mexico City (boo!) and I have some new fiction to be released shortly.

Celebrate your Friday with “Pour Some Sugar On Me”:

Why write about Northern Mexican Science Fiction? My primary goal was to let the many readers who are not exposed to literature in a language other than English get a glimpse of the cultural differences that occur in a country like Mexico. We tend to think of fiction from other countries as monolithic, for example, speaking of “African” speculative fiction, but although this may be useful for classification purposes it is also important to remember we are not referring to a single-celled structure. There is no all-encompassing Europe or Latin America.

My interest in Northern Mexican fiction – aside from a selfish geographical one due to my place of birth near the border zone – comes from its bizarre position in the Mexican literature landscape: It generates more genre fiction than other regions. In Fronteras en América Del Norte: Estudios Multidisciplinarios, the authors talk about science fiction and say that “in an area like the frontier cities, everything is possible, and it is not unusual to find a narrative that moves away from realism…and towards… science fiction”.

Fronteras en América Del Norte also mentions the novela negra (thriller, in the hard-boiled vein pioneered by Raymond Chandler) as a genre that has flourished in the North of Mexico. Why are thrillers popular? According to several writers of these type of books, the novela negra reflects the national reality of Mexico.

The success of the police thriller, however, has meant that most of the Mexican authors who wrote science fiction in the 90s have “diversified their interests, trying their hand, for example, at the thriller”, leaving behind genre fiction.

One of the solutions for current Mexican science fiction may be to marry the thriller with science fiction to produce a more commercially viable product. An example of this type of book is Historias del Septimo Sello, a novel advertised as “between the thriller and science fiction.” And that may be the space modern Mexican science fiction (in the border zone and nationally) must occupy.

For further information about Mexican science fiction see my article “Terra Incognita: A Brief History of Mexican Science Fiction” published at Strange Horizons.

If you are curious, my next novel is a speculative thriller set in Mexico. Maybe this one will be the one that lands me an agent! One can hope.

I am looking for writers, editors, artists, publishers and fans to briefly e-mail or post below on any of the following:

• Recommended Lovecraftian stories/movies/games with female protagonists.
• Recommended Lovecraftian stories and novels by female writers.
• Why are women in Lovecraft’s stories mostly peripheral or non-existent?
• What would a feminist Mythos story look like?
• Lovecraftian fiction has generally been the realm of male writers. Do you think that is changing and how?
• Anything else you can think about that relates to this topic.

I intend to talk about Lovecraft and women in his fiction, Lovecraft and the female speculative writers of the time period (such as C.L. Moore), and Lovecraft and women today.

If you want to meet up at the festival, shoot me an e-mail to let me know.

Innsmouth Magazine: Collected Issues 1-4

Innsmouth Free Press writers continue to do good: Orrin Grey’s short story “Black Hill” was originally published in Historical Lovecraft and now gets to appear in The Book of Cthulhu 2. Orrin is my co-editor for Fungi and he deserves to be in a big, mass-market paperback format.

Talking about Fungi: We have a table of contents! We’re just waiting for a few contracts to come back.

Finally, I am on the long-list for this year’s Vanderbilt-Exile Short Fiction literary competition with a story featuring giant penguins, snow and insanity. Yes, I was inspired by you-know-who (hint: Mountains). However, big penguins are not far-fetched at all. We’ve found the remains of penguins taller and heavier than emperor penguins: the Kairuku lived in the Oligocene period and would have been super intimidating.

For more information on giant prehistoric penguins read this Guardian article.

Exile: The Literary Quarterly is a Canadian journal in print since 1972. Below is a nice YouTube video explaining what they’re about.

Asenath by Paco Rico Torre

The bulk of the Fungi rejections went out today. These are all second round stories, which means we held them off for another reading. The final round rejections are going out next week. These are all folks who did well but ultimately did not make the cut. Pat yourself on the back or, if you haven’t heard from us, bite your nails because you may have one of the coveted story spots.

On other news, Innsmouth Magazine: Issues 1-4 is a new e-book from Innsmouth Free Press scheduled for a May release. It collects the first four issues of the magazine, which until now have not been available in an e-reader format. The cover artwork (which you can see here) represents Spanish artist Paco Rico Torre’s vision of Asenath Waite, one of the few female characters in H.P. Lovecraft’s stories.

Talking about Lovecraft, I have confirmation I will be speaking at the Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland this May. If you want to eat lunch, eat donuts (I definitely want to go have a Voodoo Doughnut) or what not, e-mail me or message me to let me know.