Invaders From Planet 3 - Ep 51 - Kristi Charish's Top 5

It's been a while, but we're back! The Invaders From Planet 3 bonus season continues with the return of author Kristi Charish!

In this previously-unaired mini interview, Kristi shares her list of her Top 5 favourite speculative fiction movies.

Keep in mind, it's been a couple of years since we had this conversation, so Kristi's favourites may have changed since then. But they're certainly worth searching for on your favourite streaming service.

Meantime, be sure to visit your local bookstore or library and ask how you can get copies of Kristi's books!

For more information on Kristi or her stories, visit her website:
www.kristicharish.com


To listen to Invaders From Planet 3, or to subscribe, visit Libsyn, iTunes, or your other favourite podcatching service. Be sure to rate and review us while you're there!


Let the Invasion begin!

My Nominations for the 2019 Hugo Awards

Last night I got my Hugo nominations in with about three minutes to spare. With everything involved in my recent move, as well as everyday life, I just haven't had the time lately to consider the awards, never mind vote in a timely fashion. It was only the reminder email from the awards committee that came around that spurred me into action. To be fair, I didn't read as much new stuff in 2018 as I normally like to (consequently there are a large number of categories I've left blank), but I figured I'd nominate what I did read that really stuck out for me. Here's my two bits (listed, in each category, in no particular order):


Best Novel:

They Promised Me the Gun Wasn't Loaded by James Alan Gardner

Fire & Blood by George RR Martin

The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts

The Night Lies Bleeding by MD Lachlan


Best Novella:

Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson


Best Novelette:

(No nominations in this category.)


Best Short Story:

(Feeling really guilty about this, but no nominations in this category because I didn't read many new short stories in 2018.)


Best Related Work:

(No nominations here because, unfortunately, nothing that I read in 2018 really stood out in my memory [and, in all fairness, I don't think I read widely enough last year], and I think it's kind of in poor taste to nominate one's self, so I didn't nominate anything from my blog.)


Best Graphic Story:

(No nominations here because, although I read a few graphic novels last year, I don't think any of them were published last year for the first time — they were probably collections of comic issues published the previous year.)


Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form):

Deadpool 2

(No other nominations because even though I saw a few other new sf films in 2018, I didn't think any were award-worthy.)


Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form):

The Terror — "The Ladder"

Watership Down — "The Siege"

Castlevania — "The River"

Westworld — "The Passenger"

Sense8 — "Amor Vincit Omnia"


Best Editor (Long Form):

(No nominations because, sadly, I don't pay attention when a book is edited properly, only when it's edited poorly, and that's a shame because editors who do a good job deserve recognition.)


Best Editor (Short Form):

(No nominations. See above, although in the past I have nominated for this category if an anthology has been especially good; it's just that last year I didn't read any new anthologies.)


Best Professional Artist:

(No nominations. Didn't read/look at anything new.)


Best Semiprozine:

On-Spec


Best Fanzine:

(No nominations.)


Best Fancast:

The Coode Street Podcast

Radio Free Krypton

(Normally, I would have also nominated The Three Hoarsemen, but I don't think they put out four episodes last year. I also didn't nominate my own Invaders From Planet 3 podcast because, as stated above, I'm uncomfortable with the idea of nominating one's own work.)


Best Fan Writer:

(No nominations because nothing I read in 2018 stood out in my memory, and I think it would be in poor taste to nominate myself.)


Best Fan Artist:

(No nominations.)


Best Series:

(No nominations here because, at 3 or 4 minutes to the deadline and with a million other things on my mind, my brain just wasn't processing the rules around eligibility enough to make sense of them. In retrospect, there might be a series or two that I could have nominated, but it's too late to go back and change things now. Oh well. It's kind of a weird category anyway.)


The John W Campbell Award:

(No nominations.)



Now, whether enough of the rest of the voting Worldcon membership agrees for any of these nominations to make the final ballot remains to be seen (they often don't), but even if they don't, I think it's important to give a shout-out to what I think is the good stuff.

Good luck to everyone!

Invaders From Planet 3 - Ep 27 - Nalo Hopkinson

Author, editor and professor Nalo Hopkinson joins us for our first episode of 2019. Nalo talks about her first loves in speculative fiction, including Harlan Ellison's "Shattered Like a Glass Goblin", Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain, and Kurt Vonnegut's "Welcome to the Monkey House". And she shares what it was like having the freedom to read what she wanted when she was growing up, with her library technician mother loaning Nalo her library card and letting her explore the stacks at work; and her mother and actor/poet/playwright/high school English teacher father letting her choose from their collection of books at home. We also talk about an early reading experience that didn't work out so well: her encounter with an Alfred Hitchcock anthology. And she tells us how her desire to become a writer was first sparked by a collection of Clarion short stories.

Our conversation then turns to the subject of diversity, with Nalo reflecting on Caribbean voices in the stories she encountered growing up. She talks about representation in speculative fiction, and the importance of seeing herself (or the effect of the absence of people like her) in the sf she was reading. She then discusses how this affected her own writing and her choices of how she populates her stories.

Next, we talk about Nalo's experiences working with publishers and artists to get the look of her book covers — and specifically the characters on them — right. She then goes into detail about what this has been like recently in her role as a writer contributing to the expansion of Neil Gaiman's Sandman universe at DC-Vertigo Comics. This leads to an examination of what it's like to step into a world created by another author and to make parts of it her own.

From there we move back to a discussion of what it was like to move from the Caribbean to the US and Canada, and how that shaped Nalo's writing. Here, she also reflects on her time working at Bakka-Phoenix Books, Toronto's sf specialty bookstore. Nalo talks about meeting sf legend Judith Merril during her time in Toronto as well. We also discuss what it's like in her current role teaching sf writing at the University of California Riverside.

Our discussion wraps up with a look at what Nalo's working on for 2019, including more House of Whispers stories for the Sandman comics, and her new novel that's in progress, Blackheart Man.
Our interview took place in October 2018 at the Surrey International Writers' Conference.

You can learn more about Nalo Hopkinson and her stories on her website:
https://nalohopkinson.com/index.html


To listen to Invaders From Planet 3, or subscribe, visit Libsyn, iTunes, Stitcher, Overcast and Spotify. Be sure to rate and review the show while you're there!


Let the Invasion begin!

Goodbye and Thank You, Kit Reed

Sometimes life pounces on you like an automatic tiger.

On Sunday, I'd just finished writing something for a client and decided to catch up on gossip on Facebook. A minute after logging in, it felt like I'd been kicked. My wife, hearing me say "Oh no", came in, and asked what was wrong. Kit Reed had died.

The news, posted to her feed by her son Mack, was that she'd gone in her sleep, at 85, after a battle with brain cancer.

Kit was one of my favourite authors. There are a lot of writers whose work I like. There are a few I absolutely love. Beyond that, there is a select core of absolute favourites — the ones whose work penetrates the deepest, and resonates once it gets down there so hard that it rewires my brain. Authors whose books are so damn good that I'm willing to push just about everything else on the to-be-read pile out of the way so I can crack them open as soon as they're available. Kit was one of those.

My first encounter with her work was her novel Thinner Than Thou, probably back in 2006. I don't recall whether I read about it online, or if it just caught my eye on a shelf at the bookstore, but the title just grabbed me, and after devouring the first page, I had to have it. The frankness, the cynical humour, the unflinching examination of what makes people tick and the hypocrisy of society and its portrayals of — and judgements of — weight and body image, the intelligence of the book, and its ability to be deeply dark while still allowing the possibility of hope and redemption were all served up masterfully. The descriptions of a landscape overrun by suburbs and identical mini-malls conjured up the Pretenders' song "My City Was Gone" as the relentless soundtrack to the Abercrombie family's trek to rescue Annie. William Gibson may have talked about the post-industrial tech midden of the east coast sprawl in his cyberpunk novels, but Kit's endless strip malls, though more tame in appearance, were more apocalyptic for their visceral, banal realness and inevitability.

After that, I snapped up every Kit Reed book that I could find.

It would be easy to talk about Kit as an author in comparison with literary giants of the past. She was as incisive as Thackeray, with her surgical dissection of American upper-middle-class individuals in their suburban community in Son of Destruction being as keen as the examination of its Victorian England counterparts in Vanity Fair. Their masks, self-delusions, hypocrisies, crimes, weaknesses and flaws laid bare and catalogued, the characters are then probed deeper for possible (but not guaranteed) signs of hidden strengths or redemption. In her collections The Dogs of Truth and The Story Until Now, she sometimes conjured images as soulful and melancholy as anything from Poe or Hardy. And, in everything she wrote, Kit had the ferocious, merciless wit of Twain. But her voice was all her own. Even when she played with different styles of writing, skipping gleefully and unpredictably between subjects as varied as rampaging giant babies, nocturnal visits from zombie princes, the hunts of feral girl scouts, and the hijackings of entire towns to pale alternate dimensions, you always knew you were reading a Kit Reed story.

There were two tropes in particular that were hallmarks of her stories: the transformation of banal settings into the surreal; and the notion that it's inherently dangerous for an individual to be completely isolated from a group, even if that group is itself in a dangerous situation or place, or making questionable choices. We see these tropes come up again and again in her work, especially her novels, from the theme park secretly doubling as a reality show in Magic Time, to the disease outbreak at the private school/mountaintop prison in Enclave, to the various types of hauntings taking place at the family home/trap in Mormama. Each time, Kit would pick up these tropes and re-examine them from different angles in an attempt to reveal something new and interesting about human beings, and how they behave and see the world — and each other — from within and outside of groups.

Over the years, I had the pleasure of getting to know Kit a little beyond her stories. It started when Mack came across an online review I'd written for one of her books, got in touch, and connected me to her via Facebook. She was warm, sharp, funny, and genuine, and I always enjoyed chatting with her about her stories (I still remember one day when she mentioned someone was trying to get Thinner Than Thou banned from some school somewhere in America, and I replied that it should be required reading — especially at the high school level) or what made a con just the right size to attend, or reading her posts about everyday life — from heading out to the matinee to catch some over-the-top popcorn flick, to baking for company, to the continuing adventures of her little dog, Killer.

It was also an honour and a real pleasure when I had the chance to interview her for an episode of my podcast, Invaders From Planet 3. We talked about a lot of things — the stories that were early influences, her career as a journalist, her own writing — but I think my favourite part of our conversation came near the end when we talked about comics. I listened that episode again the other day when I was in the car, and you can hear her just light up and get so excited talking about Preacher and other comics. Those are the kinds of moments that turn an interview into a delight.

And then the news came down that she was gone. No more new Kit Reed stories to challenge and entertain us. No more warm, thoughtful personality for the rest of us to orbit, whether at the distance of the internet, or — for those luckier than I, who knew her as a friend, family member, or mentor — more closely in person at her home, the university, or cons. Sure, there are other intelligent, entertaining authors who are great people to get to know, but the speculative fiction community is still diminished because she is gone. But then I look over at my bookshelf, at all of her wonderful stories waiting patiently to be revisited, and I think how lucky we all were to experience her work, and to get to know her as a person, if only for a while. And I'm grateful for that.

Thanks, Kit.

Farewell to Brian Aldiss

It's a strange feeling being a middle-aged fan these days. When I first started reading adult-level science fiction and fantasy back in the 80s, the giants of the Golden Age and New Wave still walked the Earth, and more importantly, were still publishing. One by one, over the years, the stories stopped, and their lives came to a close. A week ago, Time claimed another: Brian Aldiss.

My first encounter with Aldiss' work was as a teenager in 1989, when I read "Let's be Frank" in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories: 19 (1957), edited by Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg. The short story chronicles the life/lives of Frank, a minor noble born at the time of King Henry VIII, who passes a genetic mutation down to some of his descendants, causing them to become new vessels of his consciousness. They are not clones/separate versions of Frank; rather, a single mind existing simultaneously throughout every member of the family who shares this gene (like a fully biological version of The Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation). This allows Frank to live forever, gain wealth and power, and eventually spread his mind across the world until, through his many descendants, he constitutes about half to two-thirds of the Earth's population. It was a clever little story, and a bit funny, but there was something sad (though this isn't reflected in the story's tone — it's just my impression) and disturbing about it too, with all those new humans being born, but more and more of them just being more and more of the same old Frank, rather than unique individuals.

Over the years, I read other Aldiss short stories and novels from time to time. Some, like Super-State, were okay reads, but didn't leave much of an impression, while others, like Frankenstein Unbound, were absorbing, unsettling and left a permanent mark (the protagonist desperately treading existential water as realities shift around him with increasing frequency; the mating dance of the monsters). On the shelf right now, Harm and the Helliconia trilogy are still waiting for me to crack them open. There were also movies based on his work: Roger Corman's version of Frankenstein Unbound wasn't very good, but Spielberg and Kubrick's A.I. — Artificial Intelligence (based on "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long") was deeply affecting in places (Teddy settling resignedly back as David leans forward against the windscreen of the submerged copter, desperately praying to the Blue Fairy statue in the murky distance for ages until their power cells run out gets me every time).

One afternoon at Worldcon 2014 in London, I was trying to choose between a number of program options. One of them was a session with Brian Aldiss. While the other panels, presentations, etc looked interesting, I thought there aren't many chances to sit and listen to one of the giants of the field reminisce, and (yeah, I know, this was a bit morbid) Aldiss wasn't getting any younger, so there might not be many more to come. I met up with my buddy Geordie (who has some nice stories about meeting Aldiss at conventions throughout the years) outside, and, along with way too many other fans, we jammed ourselves into a room that was much too small and listened to Brian talk about his life and his work. Sure it was uncomfortable seating, and yeah, the AC just couldn't keep up with the heat generated by all those bodies, but it was worth every minute. Brian was funny, charming, and interesting. At the end, the con organizers wrapped up the session by leading us all in a rousing chorus of "Happy Birthday". I'm glad I had the chance to be part of it.

Brian Aldiss died on August 19, 2017 at the age of 92.


What are your memories of Brian Aldiss and his work? Share them in the Comments section below.

Salvaged from the Signal: Recollections of Memorable Short Stories

Another piece from the archives of the dearly departed SF Signal: part of a Mind Meld.

The Mind Melds were a popular feature on the site where a question on an sf-related topic would be put to a panel of participants, with their written responses collected into a post. These would usually prompt lively discussions among other community members in the comments section, sometimes with further thoughts from the original panelists.

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to contribute to a Mind Meld on memorable short stories. While I haven't included the notes from the other panelists (there were so many participants that it had to be broken up into two separate posts), here's my two bits:

MIND MELD: Memorable Short Stories to Add to Your Reading List (Part 2 of 2)

Posted on July 22, 2009 by John DeNardo in Mind Meld // 5 Comments

This week’s question is a simple one, but yielded lots of responses. We asked this week’s panelists:

Q: What are some of your favorite short stories in sf/f/h and what makes them so memorable?

Robin Shantz

Robin Shantz writes about all things SF on his site: bloginhood. He’s also a member of the editing team of the Internet Review of Science Fiction and is the author of “Passage” – the third place winner of the On Spec postcard fiction contest. When not babbling about science fiction, fantasy, etc, he works in communications for the non-profit sector in Vancouver, BC.

It’s a funny thing that my favourite short stories aren’t necessarily the ones I remember best, and those that jump immediately to mind when someone says “SF short stories” aren’t always the ones that mean the most to me. Sometimes a story will lock itself in my brain simply because of its visceral impact, or maybe because I really didn’t like it. Some just kind of hang around like old friends at a college or high school reunion – I like them well enough, even if they aren’t my favourites. As for the favourites, while some are beacons for the genre, others may just become one more tree in the forest as memories of other enjoyable reads spring up. In any case, for the purposes of this Mind Meld, here’s a selection of stories that for one reason or another were all memorable:

There’s no question that Ray Bradbury is the master of writing short stories that really hit home. There are a lot of his works that stick out in my mind, but the two that stand head and shoulders above the others are “There Will Come Soft Rains“ and “Last Rites”. TWCSR is probably one of the best-known installments in The Martian Chronicles and is memorable for being completely emotionally devastating. The Earth is in wreckage, a family’s dog drags itself home to die alone (a scene guaranteed to bring a tear to the eye of just about anyone, especially pet owners), and after disposing of the corpse, the house itself malfunctions and is destroyed. The end of this story has literally scoured the Earth of any legacy, physical or emotional, of mankind. It makes you not only think, but feel what the ultimate price of mankind’s folly could be. Meanwhile, in his collection Quicker Than The Eye, Bradbury gives us a story full of deaths with a far different tone. “Last Rites” is a time machine story, but a very different kind of time machine story than we’re used to. The protagonist isn’t interested in launching himself forward or backward in time on a voyage of discovery; he isn’t off on a dinosaur hunt; he isn’t stacking the deck to grow his own personal fortune or create temporal commerce; he’s not even in it to alter the course of history. Rather, it’s a touching story about human connections, about a man who visits some of the greatest authors in the English language on their deathbeds to comfort them by showing them proof that their books continue to be printed and read and loved far into the future, thereby assuring them that their lives and their works have meaning. Admittedly, I may blank on the title of this story from time to time, but this gentle, good story itself is forever locked in my mind.

Arthur C. Clarke is another giant who has a lot of memorable short stories. Two of my favourites are “The Star” and “Superiority”. “The Star” stands out for being not only the story of a man struggling with his faith, but the idea perhaps a god may not be worthy of worship. It also paints a moving picture of a people making a heroic effort to be remembered, even as they face their extinction. When I first watched The Fountain a few years ago (and I was reminded of this when recently reading Pete Tzinski’s review of the movie here on SF Signal), the special effects shots of the nebula as Hugh Jackman’s character flies through it matched the image I had in my mind as I read Clarke’s description of the ship flying towards the star and the time capsule planet. “Superiority”, on the other hand, with its recounting of alien military R&D disasters amidst a war with Earth, is memorable for Clarke’s unexpected and funny finish.

Theodore Sturgeon’s “When You Care, When You Love”, about a young woman who uses her inexhaustible wealth to find any way possible to save her dying husband, is another one that really sticks out. On the surface it’s certainly love story with some charm, and yet I think it’s always stuck with me because there’s something a little unsettling about the idea of rules (in this case, even the rules of life and death) not applying to the ultra-wealthy. Sure, we see a little of this in real life: in communities where you might encounter spoiled rich kids growing up in lives free of consequence, or in the financial sector with corporate raiders and morally bankrupt execs despoiling businesses, annihilating the savings of the little guy, crippling the economy and leaving thousands without jobs, then walking away with fat bonuses and pensions. But science fiction has a way of showing us just how far this mentality could go. Sturgeon’s Sylva Wycke, though loving and benevolent, is none-the-less the literary ancestor of Asimov’s Solarians (in his Elijah Bailey Robot novels) or the Tessier-Ashpools in the Villa Straylight space station in William Gibson’s Neuromancer who are so rich and so far above the rules and challenges of the rest of humanity that they have in effect become alien. I’m no class warrior, but there’s something a little frightening about that, and it’s haunted me since the first time I read WYCWYL.

Speaking of stories that haunt, Philip K. Dick’s “The Father Thing“ isn’t what I would call a favourite, but it’s always stood out for being very creepy. The story is about a boy who has to enlist the help of some other neighbourhood kids when he finds out that his father has been eaten and replaced by an alien android and that there are other dopplegangers being grown in the grove behind the house. In many ways, it’s the ultimate example of Dickian paranoia distilled into just over 10 pages – the question of what’s real, are people actually who they say they are or is it all a sham and are they actually out to get you? Certainly, having been published in 1954, it can be seen metaphorically as a product of its time: a typical Cold War we’re-gonna-be-subverted-and-replaced-by-reds scary tale. Looking at the kids, you can see them as an idealized America in miniature: the white kids (each from different ethnic backgrounds) working with the black kid; one representing emotion while one is brawn and one is the brains – ultimately, a coalition of different individuals contributing their unique talents to take down the enemy. You could also say that it’s a story of growing up; that as a child ages, he changes and his sense of who his parents are changes as well. He has to deal with crises himself, and, in a somewhat Oedipal kind of way (because he has to take out the Father thing, not a Mother thing), he has to overthrow the father figure. But what really works with this story is that it grabs you with the sense of deadliness and betrayal being associated with the most familiar settings and people that are supposed to be safe. The garage is where the killing is done, the stone walkway hides an alien, the grove behind the house (a bamboo grove no less, which one would think is a pretty alien thing in a typical US suburb of the 50’s and in fact harkens back to the battlefields of the Pacific in WWII and of the Korean War) isn’t a place to play because it’s full of garbage and rot and is where the dopplegangers are grown. Even the house itself isn’t safe, as the Father Thing chases the boy up to his room under the guise of going to have “a talk” with him. The fact that the aliens have replaced the father is particularly terrifying, because if you can’t trust your family, who can you trust? This taps into the primal fear all kids have of their parents being taken away from them, and the greater horror that some unfortunate children have of living with abusive parents who, to others, may appear normal on the outside, but within the home are monsters. Because it scares on so many levels, TFT is a story I won’t forget.

Another story that’s deeply unsettling, but for different reasons, is Spider Robinson’s “User Friendly”. The notion that a person can be, without warning, taken control of by alien minds who want to experience life on Earth through human senses but who have no concern at all for the human they’re occupying and no knowledge or care of how a human being can safely experience life on this world is obviously scary. What’s even worse is the thought of having to be a person watching their spouse go through this, being powerless to stop it, and being left in a position of worrying each time whether their loved one will come back alive, and if so how physically and emotionally damaged they will be.

“Outport”, by Garfield Reeves-Stevens, is a story that sticks with me both for the starkness of its landscape (or seascape, as the case may be) and the mindset of the people who are forced to survive in it by any means necessary.

Cory Doctorow’s cynical and funny “The Super Man and the Bugout“ comes to mind anytime I watch a superhero movie or spend any time browsing in a comic book store. It’s portrayal of what a real Superman (or, in this case, Super Man) would have to go through in terms of navigating government bureaucracy and political opportunism, staying relevant if aliens eliminated crime and war, putting up with greedy landlords, and answering to a loving, if pushy old mother, and is in many ways the answer to the simplistic portrayal of costumed vigilante life served up by comics.

I’ll end on a light note with Dennis L. McKiernan’s “The Halfling House”, about a hobbit hole that travels TARDIS-like between fantasy universes, acting as a getaway resort for halflings, leprechauns, faeries and other wee folk. No deep metaphors or incisive views of humanity here, this story is just memorable for being really funny.