I’m in the Spring 2018 issue of BSFA’s “Vector” talking about board games, SFF, terraforming&the spectre of board-g*mergate. You can find out more about the issue or purchase it here.
Advertisements
Engage, Episode 87: “Kirk Drift” (podcast)
Here I am on “Engage”, CBS’s official Star Trek podcast, hosted by Jordan Hoffman.
“March 05, 2018
Episode 87: Kirk Drift!
01:30:26
What if I told you that James T. Kirk Is not really the macho, womanizing captain that he is often remembered as? This week on Engage, we welcome writer Erin Horáková, author of “Freshly Remember’d: Kirk Drift” which explains just how our collective conscious settled on this exaggerated depiction of our beloved captain. You can check out the article in full at strangehorizons.com.”
Listen here.
Paddington 2 (review)
One night at after-work drinks, a developer on my girlfriend’s team announced without any irony that “Paddington 2 is sick.” “It’s like, really political,” he continued approvingly, his East London accent coming on especially strong a few beers in. Indeed, Paddington 2 is both sick and thoroughly political from start to finish. If the first film was “fuck UKIP, the children’s movie,” Paddington 2 maintains an unimpeachable level of craft, reinforces this stance and pushes itself to think and to say yet a little more.
Read full article here.
Nirvana in Fire / Lángyá Bǎng (review)
In December of 2017, The Wind Blows in Chang Lin, the sequel to Nirvana in Fire, or Lángyá Bǎng, began airing in China. Though it is probable that many readers of this site were completely unaware of the event, it was without exaggeration one of the most anticipated releases in the world. The original Nirvana in Fire had, after all, been an incredible success both as an online serial novel and as a 2015 television series, “surpassing ten million views by its second day, and receiving a total number of daily internet views on iQiyi of over 3.3 billion by the end of the series. Nirvana in Fire was considered a social media phenomenon, generating 3.55 billion posts on Sina Weibo that praised its characters and story-line. As of December 2016, it has a total view of 13 billion views as reported by VLinkage.” [1]
Of course, a Chinese series may have 13 billion “legitimate” views, incredibly well-received Korean and Japanese syndications, and popular fan translations into various languages and yet raise not one whisper in Anglophone media discourse. There the boosterising think pieces sit, chewing the exhausted fat of a mediocre direct-to-Netflix serial with a title not even the pieces’ writers will clearly remember in two years’ time, exalting prestige television that uses its indisputably high production values to tell maybe three discrete, distended soap operatic stories which center middle-class white male subjectivity in played-out Modernist crisis say 80% of the time. We are given to understand that good television began existing a decade ago, exclusively in the US and maybe a little bit in the UK, with special mention of that Nordic crime thing you like, and that the world is even now bounded in the nutshell of the coastal borders of the US. The fact that this is nakedly market-driven, ahistorical nonsense—and frankly racist—is not particularly important to such analyses.
I am reviewing the original Nirvana in Fire now because, quite soon, the fansubs of the sequel will percolate out. They will be very imperfect, but they are all you will get, because there will be no official translations. [2] In order to engage with The Wind Blows in Chang Lin you will probably want to know something about the original Nirvana in Fire, which alas has the same translation issue. And the original is so revelatory that for all this you had better give it a go or I will come to your house and kill you in real life, I swear to god.
Read full article here.
Fiction Publication This Year
Still Out:
Rumpelstiltskin (urban fantasy, m/f erotica)
For who are so free as the sons of the waves? (historical fiction, m/m erotica, urban or high fantasy)
“she would cast him to the Wolf, the Wolf should have him” (historical fiction, m/f erotica, urban fantasy)
The Able and the Virtuous Consorts (historical fiction, f/f erotica)
Well-Fortified (historical fiction, horror, m/m erotica)
Lawful Evil (historical fiction, m/m erotica, urban fantasy)
Needs Resubmitted:
Coming Alongside (historical fiction, m/m erotica, arguably steampunkish)
If the sky holds (urban fantasy)
Senbazuru (m/m erotica)
Bunkmates (post-apocalyptic sf, m/m erotica)
Post-Production (m/m erotica)
Due to Be Published:
Couched in a Curious Bed (historical fiction, m/genderfluid intersex erotica)
Solo Exhibition (m/f erotica, out March 8)
Rereading (f/f erotica, Owning It, out 28 March)
A Year Without the Taste of Meat (f/f romance, SF, kickstarter soon)
Out:
Bacchae (SF, out October 2017)
Too Frequent A Place (horror, historical fiction, fantasy, m/m erotica, out October 2017)
Dinner Plans (m/m erotica, out October 2017)
“Rereading”, Owning It
You can now order “Owning It”, from SinCyr Publishing, here. If you’d like a review copy, please contact the publishers here.
I’m particularly happy with “Rereading”, my story in this one. Avery is about to leave for uni, and her step-father’s paralegal Sheba thinks they should actually talk about their long-running sexual tension before she does. Contains a nasty, loaded argument about Gaudy Night and realisations about one’s sexuality by way of a very butch haircut and very femme nails.
“Solo Exhibition”, Corrupted
This is out March 8th and includes my story “Solo Exhibition”, in which cookbook writer Usha plays Scheherazade for her foreign rights agent (and definitely not boyfriend) Jory. You can buy it at Amazon and various other outlets, or secure a review copy by contacting the publishers at hello@sexylittlepages.com .
