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Last week’s guests got the month off to a great start! This week’s posts begin tomorrow, and you can see this week’s schedule below. I am also excited to be giving 2 copies of The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison today!

But before this week’s guest lineup, here’s a brief overview of last week’s discussions.

Week In Review

In case you missed any of last week’s guest posts, here’s what happened:

Upcoming Guests: Week Two

It was a great first week, and I’m also excited about next week’s guests:

Women in SF&F 2014 Week 2

April 7: M. L. Brennan (Generation V, Iron Night)
April 8: Grace from Books Without Any Pictures
April 9: Deborah J. Ross (The Seven-Petaled Shield, Jaydium, Northlight)
April 10: Alex Hughes (Clean, Sharp, Marked)
April 11: Anya from On Starships & Dragonwings
April 12: Rachel Bach (Paradox, The Legend of Eli Monpress)

Giveaway

Courtesy of Tor Books, I have two copies of The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison to give away! This giveaway is open to North American residents, and two winners will each receive one copy of this book.

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

About The Goblin Emperor:

A vividly imagined fantasy of court intrigue and dark magics in a steampunk-inflected world, by a brilliant young talent.

The youngest, half-goblin son of the Emperor has lived his entire life in exile, distant from the Imperial Court and the deadly intrigue that suffuses it. But when his father and three sons in line for the throne are killed in an “accident,” he has no choice but to take his place as the only surviving rightful heir.

Entirely unschooled in the art of court politics, he has no friends, no advisors, and the sure knowledge that whoever assassinated his father and brothers could make an attempt on his life at any moment.

Surrounded by sycophants eager to curry favor with the naïve new emperor, and overwhelmed by the burdens of his new life, he can trust nobody. Amid the swirl of plots to depose him, offers of arranged marriages, and the specter of the unknown conspirators who lurk in the shadows, he must quickly adjust to life as the Goblin Emperor. All the while, he is alone, and trying to find even a single friend… and hoping for the possibility of romance, yet also vigilant against the unseen enemies that threaten him, lest he lose his throne – or his life.

This exciting fantasy novel, set against the pageantry and color of a fascinating, unique world, is a memorable debut for a great new talent.

Read an Excerpt from The Goblin Emperor

Giveaway Rules: To be entered in the giveaway, fill out the form below OR send an email to kristen AT fantasybookcafe DOT com with the subject “The Goblin Emperor Giveaway.” One entry per person and two winners will be randomly selected. Those from North America are eligible to win this giveaway. The giveaway will be open until the end of the day on Sunday, April 13. Each winner has 24 hours to respond once contacted via email, and if I don’t hear from them by then a new winner will be chosen (who will also have 24 hours to respond until someone gets back to me with a place to send the book).

Please note email addresses will only be used for the purpose of contacting the winners. Once the giveaway is over all the emails will be deleted.

Good luck!

Update: Now that the giveaway is over, the form has been removed.

Women in SF&F Month Banner

Today’s guest is fantasy author Anne Lyle! Her work includes Night’s Masque, a historical fantasy trilogy set during the Elizabethan era (The Alchemist of Souls, The Merchant of Dreams, and The Prince of Lies). She’s also a scientist and her discussion is about how science does not have to be limited to science fiction—fantasy can be built upon scientific concepts, too!

The Alchemist of Souls by Anne Lyle The Merchant of Dreams by Anne Lyle The Prince of Lies by Anne Lyle

Back when I was a teenager, I was all about the science. Science fiction, science fact – I devoured it all. My favourite subject at school was biology, so of course I loved stories about aliens, such as the “Hospital Station” series by James White, and anything by Ursula Le Guin or Andre Norton. By contrast, history was a more ambivalent subject. I loved pseudo-historical swashbucklers like “Scaramouche” and “The Scarlet Pimpernel”, but our history lessons in school were deadly dull.

In those days (the 1970s) and at an aspirational girls’ grammar school like the one I attended, a broad curriculum was not admired – we were destined for university and academic careers, so we specialised early. At 14 I ditched arts and humanities to focus on science and languages, went on to take a degree in zoology, and eventually found my way into web development and bioinformatics. And yet despite this high-tech focus, I ended up writing fantasy instead of science fiction. So what happened?

I think it started in my late teens, when I discovered the three-volume paperback edition of “The Lord of the Rings” in a local bookshop. I’d read fantasy before, of course, but here was a world as vast and awesome as anything I’d encountered in SF – plus it heavily featured the natural world that I loved. For the next couple of decades I read a mixture of fantasy and SF – and in some cases, like Julian May’s “The Saga of the Exiles”, a heady blend of the two.

Then in the latter half of the 1980s, two opposing fiction genres vied for my attention. On the one hand there was one of the hottest new paperback series, the Brother Cadfael historical crime novels by Ellis Peters. I’d always loved detective stories, and the combination of a classical whodunnit with a medieval setting rekindled my interest in English history.

At the same time it was the heyday of cyberpunk: the novels of William Gibson, Walter Jon Williams, George Alec Effinger and their peers – and of course the movies. Blade Runner and Robocop epitomised this sub-genre and painted a picture of a cynical but still fascinating future where biology and technology collide. For a while it seemed like the perfect mix…

But by the mid-90s, reality had started to catch up with fiction. Cyberspace was here, but instead of glowing pyramids and jacking in, we had HTML and the dot-com bubble. The future was now and it was both exciting and really rather mundane – which left science fiction feeling a bit…unnecessary? It didn’t help that, during the 80s, I’d discovered environmentalism and started to feel pessimistic about the future of our planet. SF was no longer the shiny beacon of hope, but a harbinger of doom. Faced with a rapidly changing world, perhaps it’s not surprising that many SFF fans took refuge in an idealised past of sword-wielding heroes trekking across an untamed wilderness. And so I, like so many of the reading public, turned to fantasy for my sensawunda thrills.

For the writer, fantasy offers some distinct advantages over science fiction. For one thing, writing good SF requires a solid understanding of science and technology, which might seem daunting to a non-scientist. (Which is not to belittle the specialist knowledge required to write convincing fantasy.) My earliest attempts at writing fiction, way back in my teens, were of course SF – thankfully they are lost in the mists of time, as I fear the science was very bad. In my defence, I was only fourteen!

That said, a background in science can still come in useful when writing fantasy. Just because you’re writing about magic and primitive technologies, it doesn’t mean you have to throw your scientific knowledge out of the window. Sure, there are many fine authors who have drawn solely on myth and legend for their fantasy, but SFF has always been a continuum between hard science and the completely fantastical.

An example of how I blend the two in my own work is the skraylings in my historical fantasy series Night’s Masque, which is set in late 16th/early 17th century Europe. I wanted to create a fantasy race that wasn’t based on folklore like elves and dwarves but on the principles of biology I had learned during my education. Admittedly I found ways to fit them into existing folklore, because that’s how the people of that era would have understood them, but in my mind they were normal flesh-and-blood creatures like ourselves.

One of the key aspects that defines any culture is their family structure, and so for my skraylings I adopted some behaviours that are more usually seen in birds than in mammals. Male and female skraylings live apart for most of the year and only come together for the mating season, when the males “display” and the females choose mates. Being an intelligent, civilised species, these mating rituals have turned into festivals of artistic and sporting excellence, similar to the original Olympic Games, so they are not so dissimilar from human customs – and yet the segregation of the sexes permeates skrayling culture and colours their attitudes in ways that seep into characters and plot and hopefully make the whole fictional structure believable.

Right now I’m working on the worldbuilding for a new fantasy series, this time set in a wholly invented world – and once again I’m drawing on both science and history (and the history of science) to give it realism and weight. I guess you could say that I’m still as much in love with science as I ever was, but I’ve found new ways to use it without having to confine my stories to future settings. For a scientist who loves fantasy, it really is the best of all possible worlds!

Anne Lyle

Anne Lyle was born in what is popularly known as “Robin Hood Country”, and grew up fascinated by English history, folklore, and swashbuckling heroes. Unfortunately there was little demand in 1970s Nottinghamshire for diminutive swordswomen, so she studied sensible subjects like science and languages instead.

It appears, however, that although you can take the girl out of Sherwood Forest, you can’t take Sherwood Forest out of the girl. She now spends practically every spare hour writing – or at least planning – fantasy fiction about dashing swordsmen and scheming spies, set in alternate pasts or imaginary worlds.

Her published works include the Night’s Masque trilogy – The Alchemist of Souls, The Merchant of Dreams and The Prince of Lies – which came out in 2012-13, and a short story in the 2013 BFS fantasy anthology Unexpected Journeys.

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Alternate history, fantasy, and science fiction author Beth Bernobich is here today to discuss the issue of women’s invisibility in speculative fiction! She is the author of the River of Souls series (the RT Reviewer’s Choice Award-winning novel Passion Play, Queen’s Hunt, and Allegiance), Fox and Phoenix, and much more. Some of her short fiction can be found on Tor.com, and I highly recommend checking out her excellent story “River of Souls.” Her next book, The Time Roads, will be released this fall.

Passion Play Fox & Phoenix by Beth Bernobich The Time Roads by Beth Bernobich

THE INVISIBLE WOMAN
by Beth Bernobich

If I had a dollar for every time someone said, “Women don’t write science fiction or fantasy,” I could buy enough books to fill my house a second time over.

If I had 10 dollars for every time someone else said, “Oh, I read SF/F books by women,” and the names they recited were the same two or three you always hear, I could fund a library. Extra points if any of the authors are dead.

If I had $100 each time a critically acclaimed SF/F book put women characters front and center, I’d have to find another source of income.

Over and over, I hear that women don’t write the genre, they don’t read the genre, and they certainly can’t be the main character, unless it’s urban fantasy, and that’s really romance, so naturally that doesn’t count. And inevitably the conversation drifts back to the men who write genre, and the guys they write about.

Joanna Russ described the situation in her book, How to Suppress Women’s Writing. “She didn’t write it.” (Mary Shelley) “She wrote it, but she’s an anomaly.” (Butler, Le Guin, Tiptree) “She wrote it but look what she wrote about.” (Urban fantasy written by women.)

Women write in every single subgenre of SF–whether it’s hard SF, epic fantasy, steampunk, military SF, new or old weird–but either their names get left off the genre lists, or the list includes only a few standard names, or the genre they write is reclassified from SF/F to something else. And the way women are depicted in the genre–as prizes or plot points–only exacerbates the situation. That, too, is something that Russ covers, when she talks about popularizing works that relegate women to demeaning roles.

It’s a two-fold problem. How can we explode the myth that women don’t write SF/F? And how can we undo the ingrained assumption we can’t have women as main characters, with agendas of their own? (Or if we do have a woman front and center, why is she the only one in the book?)

Luckily, we have Fantasy Café’s Women in SF&F Month, now in its third year. And luckily other bloggers are covering this same topic, among them Liz Bourke, Tansy Roberts, Kameron Hurley, Foz Meadows, and Natalie Luhrs.

But there’s more we can do, both as readers and writers.

Read More.

Read more books by women, that is. These days, I am deliberately seeking out more women authors for my TBR list. I look for recommendations about new authors, or established authors that are new to me. Ones who write in familiar subgenres, and ones who take me outside my comfort zone. I might not love every single book, but who knows until I try them?

This isn’t about quotas, by the way. This is about making conscious choices, expanding the kinds of books I read, and discovering new-to-me authors.

Talk more.

When I do find a new favorite author, I make a point of telling other people about them. If someone asks me for names of authors who deserve more attention, I’ll mention Cat Hellisen and Jacqueline Koyanagi. If someone says they love alternate history, I’ll tell them about Kate Elliott’s Spiritwalker trilogy and Cherie Priest’s Clockwork Universe. For hard SF, I’ll name M. J. Locke and Tricia Sullivan. For epic fantasy, Tansy Roberts, Judith Tarr, and Juliet McKenna. For worldbuilding, I’ll recommend Martha Wells, or Nnedi Okorafor, or Aliette de Bodard, or…

You get the idea.

Women write SF/F, but if no one talks about us, it only perpetuates the myth we don’t write in the genre. So. Tell your friends about that amazing author you discovered. Write that review on Amazon. Add that author and their books to the next Goodreads list you make. And maybe, with all the talk, the next conversation about books in the genre will include their names.

Write More.

It’s no coincidence that the authors I mentioned write about strong women. It’s also not a coincidence that these authors go beyond including the one token woman. Their characters have friends and sisters and cousins and mothers, all with strengths and agendas of their own.

But, but, I hear you say. I don’t like quotas. I just want to write good stories.

So do we all. That includes good stories by and about women.

Look, I know how easy it is to fall into the default mode of focusing on the men. That’s the narrative we’ve always heard, in books and movies, in the historical records, in our daily lives. Men are more interesting. Men do the important stuff. We can add a woman here and there, but not too many, and after all, we need a good reason to include any woman, never mind lots of them.

Which makes no sense. Women make up half the population. Women have always played important roles throughout history. So what gives? Other than assumptions and preconceptions, that is.

Oh, but assumptions and preconceptions are strong. Here’s my story.

Two years ago, I decided to make an experiment. I was writing a YA fantasy story. When I started, I knew a couple things. That it would focus on three friends working on a school project together. One had a crush on the other. All three were young women. But what about the rest? There had to be a teacher, of course. Did he have a backstory? How much story space would he need?

That’s when it hit me. Why did the teacher have to be a guy?

I decided at that point I would only include male characters if I had a good reason to. And to my surprise, there were no good reasons. The teacher became a woman. The main character’s family consisted of sisters and a mother. The kingdom became a queendom, and the heir a daughter. The shape-shifting ghost dragon turned into a woman in human form. One by one, the men and boys faded into the background or disappeared altogether.

None of my readers, men or women, complained. And the editor who requested the story bought it.

Fast forward to last year. I’m writing the fourth novella for my alt-history novel THE TIME ROADS, which takes place in the late 19th/early 20th century. This novel consists of three previously published stories, plus a new one. As I wrote the fourth one, I struggled with myself. The existing stories utterly failed the Bechdel Test, even with its remarkably low standards. How could I counteract that? There was the strong queen, of course. But what about historical accuracy? And wouldn’t the genius scientist mathematician guy be the logical hero in this tale? Or the queen’s spymaster? Why try to shove yet another woman into the story?

Except I had forgotten an existing character–another woman, also a genius scientist mathematician. Whose backstory fit perfectly with the front story.

You see how insidiously easy it is to fall into that mode of men first and foremost?

In the end, I wrote the final story with the queen and the woman scientist saving the world. They aren’t friends or lovers. They are uneasy allies, both strong, both flawed, but who both want the best for their world. And in the end, it’s both historically accurate and true to the overall plot arc.

End Point.

It’s a long road, undoing this myth about women and genre. But it’s a road filled with some damned good books. So let’s go forth and read more books, then talk about them with our friends. In fact, I have this wonderful novel from Martha Wells called The Wizard Hunters that I just bought…

—————-

Here are a few links and blogs that inspired me to write this post:

Reading, Writing, Radicalisation

And the follow-up to that post

We Have Always Fought: Challenging The Women, Cattle, and Slaves Narrative

Historically Authentic Sexism in Fantasy. Let’s Unpack That.

The Women We Don’t See

Radish Reviews

Beth Bernobich writes fantasy, science fiction, and alternate history. Her short stories have appeared in venues such as Asimov’s, Interzone, Tor.com, and Strange Horizons. Her first novel, Passion Play, won the 2010 RT Reviewer’s Choice Award for Best Epic Fantasy and was long-listed for the Tiptree Award. Her forthcoming book, The Time Roads, will be available October 2014 from Tor Books.

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Today’s guest is Khanh from The Book Nookery! She prolifically reads and discusses books from a wide variety of genres, including speculative fiction, and I enjoy reading her thoughts and insights so much that I frequently read what she writes about books in genres I never read. Her analysis is both thorough and entertaining, and she articulates her points clearly and with a sense of humor. Khanh is one of my favorite reviewers, and I’m thrilled she’s here this month discussing a subject that is near and dear to many of us fantasy fans and the two series that were her gateway to discovering her own love for it.

The Book Nookery

Some little girls dreamed of ponies and unicorns. My girlhood self dreamed of the creatures who ate those horses for a snack.

Dragons. I have always loved dragons. Benevolent or malevolent, grand, or just…grandfatherly. Dragons come in all sizes and shapes and temperaments, and I loved them all.

My love of these fantastic creatures began with the wonderful Patricia Wrede. I have gone on to read (and love) her other works, but there is no doubt that my adventure began as a 10-year old with the Dealing with Dragons series.

I grew up in Vietnam, and in Asian culture, there really was no room for amusing, dry-witted dragons. Our dragons are fierce, they are a force of nature, gods not to be reckoned with.

Not so with Patricia Wrede’s dragons.

The Enchanted Forest Trilogy

This middle grade series is called The Enchanted Forest Chronicles, and it is by no means a misnomer; from the very first moment I cracked open this book, I was enchanted, enthralled. It is such a good series for younger girls. We have a princess who is not your usual frippery Disney type. She has a backbone, she likes learning, she is intelligent, rational, and never rhymes-with-itchy. She has a boring life. Princess Cimorene wants more. She knows there is a life beyond a forced marriage.

And the dragons! Those fierce, fiery, fire-breathing dragons!!!!

…not quite.

They sneeze.

The gray-green dragon mopped his streaming eyes and blew his nose. “That’s better, I think. Achoo! Oh, drat!”

The ball of fire that accompanied the dragon’s sneeze had reduced the handkerchief to a charred scrap.

They’re not particularly fond of eating princesses (princesses are so stringy!), and they’re not particularly impressive to cats.

“He doesn’t seem very impressed,” Cimorene commented in some amusement.
“Why should he be?” Kazul said.
“Well, you’re a dragon,” Cimorene answered, a little taken aback.
“What difference does that make to a cat?”

To be fair, it’s nigh on impossible to impress a cat.

This series started me on yet another…Anne McCaffrey’s Dragons of Pern series.

These dragons are more likely to think you taste good with ketchup than the previous dragons. These creatures don’t talk, they communicate telepathically, but they’re rather more grand and awe-inspiring for that. The strong and silent types are always more impressive.

Oh, I’m well aware that this is an adult series with very adult topics and some hmm-hmm going on between the dragons themselves, as well as their riders. But what readers may not know that right smack in the middle of this long adult series, there is a subseries that is quite appropriate for younger readers, the Harper Hall trilogy.

Oh, Tongue, give sound to joy and sing
Of hope and promise on dragonwing.

Harper Hall Trilogy

Once again, this series is just excellent for younger readers, younger girls specifically. There is nothing inappropriate here, the romance is light, and it is a beautiful journey of self-discovery, of coming to terms with the fact that your fate doesn’t have to be confined to what society dictates it to be. It is about taking risks, daring to dream. It is the story of Menolly, a girl from a fishing village with extraordinary musical talent. A talent that is forbidden to her because of her gender.

In her village, girls are meant to be wives, mothers, helpers to their mate. A career in music, in teaching and playing music, is simply out of the question.

It is the story of a girl who runs away and builds her own destiny, along the way, she gathers a clutch of fire lizards…tiny little dragons.

It is a part of the Dragonriders of Pern series, and we will encounter familiar faces here (and familiar dragons). The terminology and culture and setting of our beloved land of Pern is very much there, but this book is about the Harper Hall, it is about music, about song. And it is just delightful. Those who love music will appreciate the details that go into Menolly’s musical training. The instruments, the pitches, the lessons; above all else, they feel Menolly’s joy in that she is finally able to do something she loves.

This series is a sweet little interlude and a lovely introduction for readers not yet old enough for the main Dragonriders series.

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Today’s guest is New York Times bestselling author Cinda Williams Chima! She is the author of two young adult fantasy series, The Heir Chronicles and Seven Realms, and she is sharing some of her thoughts and experiences as a reader, fan, and author of speculative fiction.

I am delighted she is here today since I love her Seven Realms books. (I haven’t yet read The Heir Chronicles, but I added them to my wish list after finishing the last Seven Realms book since I now must read everything she writes.) After reading The Demon King, I saved each successive book in the series to read during a time when I wanted to read a book that would work. This was a good decision since the books keep getting better, and the series is a definite keeper for its page-turning qualities and wonderful fantasy adventure—but, most of all, for the characters. Street thief Han and the princess-heir Raisa were two characters that have stuck with me, and I was sad to leave them behind when I turned that final page. In fact, I still miss them.

The Gray Wolf Throne by Cinda Williams Chima The Crimson Crown by Cinda Williams Chima The Enchanter Heir by Cinda Williams Chima

I suppose one of the benefits of growing older is the opportunity to look at the back trail, and say, “Okay, maybe we’re getting somewhere.”

On other days, I feel like we’re sliding down the mountain backwards. On our butts.

I’m talking about the role of women in speculative fiction, as readers, writers, and characters.

I grew up reading anything I could get my hands on, from my aunt’s True Story and True Confession magazines to my mother’s historical fiction to my older brother’s comic books and pulp sci-fi novels with their lurid covers and yellowing pages. I brought home Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew novels by the sack, borrowed from the teen daughters of my parents’ friends. I read Reader’s Digest condensed books and book-of-the-month club mysteries, which made up the bulk of our home library. I devoured Ian Fleming’s James Bond series long before I knew why 007 was so eager to let women share his bed.

Though I read a variety of genres, I became, and continue to be, a committed fantasy fan.

As a teen, I read Tolkien and Eddings, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Mercedes Lackey, Mary Stewart and Jean Auel. Mostly I read novels written for adults. The golden age of young adult lit was still years away.

Even in those pre-fanfic days, I made up new story lines and acted them out in the woods by my house.

That’s the great thing about reading—it’s participative. Readers and writers are partners in story.  I wanted to live in a fictional world where I had a chance at adventure and romance. I needed stories that had the ability to take me away at times when I really needed it.

I really didn’t care—and often didn’t notice—whether a book was written by a man or a woman—the key was whether I felt welcome in that story.

I didn’t like those stories where the female characters have little to do; where they have no agency, no journey of their own; where they do not act, but react. Why should they be victims or prizes, but not heroes themselves? Who wants to role play that? It was too much like real life.

So I began writing my own novels, mostly aspirational stories starring characters just like me and my friends having the kind of adventures that never happened at Cloverdale Junior High. I wrote them in longhand in notebooks, and traded them with my friends. I still have some of the novels I wrote in those days.

When I was sixteen, I began working at the local newspaper, typing advertising copy. Women worked in the phone room, taking real estate and Help Wanted: Male and Help Wanted: Female classified ads.

Yes. I am that old.

Men worked in the field room. They went out and called on customers and had expense accounts. They sold display ads, and were allowed to smoke at their desks. They referred to the phone room ghetto as the “barracuda room.”

I worked there through high school and college. It was great training for a writer, writing and editing copy, meeting deadlines. My keyboard skills are stellar, even today.

I never stopped writing, but for a long time I focused on short work, the kinds of projects I could complete in the corners of life. I returned to writing novels as an adult, when my sons were thirteen and sixteen. We all enjoyed reading fantasy, and often read it together. I wanted to write a story that teens of both genders would enjoy reading. I had this idea about a high school boy in Ohio who discovers he’s one of the last survivors of a guild of magical warriors. I chose a boy because it had been a long time since I’d lived in teen girl world, and I worried that I might not get it right. But I had two teenaged boys living right in my home.

That was the story that became my first published novel, The Warrior Heir.

Because my publisher thought the book would appeal to boys, they asked if I would consider using my initials, a la J.K. Rowling, so as not to discourage boy readers. I knew that we were on the same side: both authors and publishers want the right readers to find our books. And when you really think about it, girl readers have a lot more freedom to read what they like than boys do. Maybe that’s why we read more.

Still, I declined. My mother named me after a character in a novel. I like my name, and I’d waited my whole life to see it on the cover of a book. Maybe it’s driven off a few potential readers, but, oh, well.

I don’t buy into the stereotype that boys like the science in sci-fi and girls like the sparkles in fantasy. Some do, some don’t. It’s a matter of personal preference. I love shiny things, but my connection to a story is all about my relationship with the characters. In some of the high concept spec fiction I’ve read, the characters seem secondary. The focus is on the machine, the technology, the magic, the brilliant idea. All of which is cool—anyone who reads my fiction knows that I love world-building. But if I don’t care about the characters, I will put the book down.

A great premise is not enough. Real life is not made up of premises. It’s a tangled web of joys and catastrophes and people succeeding and failing at relationships, all threads of conflict. To paraphrase Hitchcock, the difference between fiction and real life is that in fiction we leave the dull bits out.

I’ve published four novels in the Heir Chronicles series, with a fifth, The Sorcerer Heir, coming this fall. I’ve also published four novels set in the high fantasy world of The Seven Realms. I don’t know the demographics of my readers, but I see adults and teens of both genders at my signings, and I get fan mail from both. Teachers, librarians, parents, and booksellers tell me that both boys and girls like to live in my worlds.

It helps that I’ve had great covers. A good cover makes a promise that the book keeps. My covers are a brand that anyone—male or female, adult or teen, people of all races or sexual orientation—can carry around without feeling self conscious. I write character-driven stories with no characters on the covers. So hopefully any reader can partner with me, and no reader feels unwelcome.

These days, I read more young adult than adult lit, and more fantasy than science fiction. The science fiction I read tends to be character-driven. I read great fantasy fiction by George R.R. Martin, Rae Carson, Robin LaFevers, Maggie Stiefvater, Holly Black, and Kristin Cashore. I read science fiction by Paolo Bacigalupi, Veronica Roth, Suzanne Collins, and Rick Yancey.

When I originally pitched the Seven Realms, my publisher was dubious. The story alternates viewpoints between a male street-gang leader and a princess. You have so many boy readers, they said. Will they read about a princess in the long ago and far away?

Now I have to admit that I have trouble even saying the word princess, because it has so much baggage attached. But my princess is a first daughter, heir to the throne in a queendom beset with treacherous politics, forbidden magic, and wizards behaving badly. She is the only one standing between the queendom and disaster, and she is not one to suffer fools.

Yes, I said. They will read about a princess. And they have.

Cinda Williams Chima

Cinda Williams Chima was named after a character in a book. She grew up with talking animals and kick-butt Barbies. She nearly failed first grade because she was always daydreaming instead of listening. By junior high, she was writing novels in class, which were often confiscated. She was also caught reading a very racy novel in Problems of Democracy class. That was confiscated, too. Unfortunately, it belonged to a friend of her mother’s. With a degree in philosophy and two degrees in nutrition, Cinda is a totally uncredentialed writer. But she believes in the magic of books. Books took her from first grade failure to first generation college graduate to college professor to New York Times best-selling author of two teen fantasy series: The Heir Chronicles and The Seven Realms.

These days, she daydreams on the page.

Webpage: cindachima.com
Blog: http://cindachima.blogspot.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CindaWilliamsChima
Twitter: @cindachima

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For the second year in a row, Women in SF&F Month is opening with a guest post by Renay! She is one of the three awesome bloggers who run one of my favorite blogs, Lady Business, and she has also written articles for Strange Horizons. Lady Business is a great site for book reviews, discussions of television shows, and insightful commentary on subjects related to speculative fiction, and I also always find interesting articles to read in the Sidetracks posts. I have a particular fondness for the way Renay discusses fandom, and I always enjoy reading anything she writes.

As for what she’s sharing with us today… I’ll let her fill you in on the details!

Lady Business

It’s a new year and a whole new version of Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy Month. It’s a perfect time to get excited about women in genre, especially if you like a good reading list. If you do, well, you’ve come to the right themed event.

Last year, Kristen and I asked people to recommend ten science fiction and fantasy books by women that they loved and submit them to a list for compilation. We wanted to crowdsource, if not a definitive list, at least a list long and full of enough women writers that a reader looking for women writers would never lack for a recommendation.

I was humbled and overwhelmed by the incredible response we received. Almost 2500 individual recommendations from almost 200 people have created a list of epic proportions, of almost 1000 books: The Big Giant List of Fantasy and Science Fiction Books by Women.

This list is a perfect example showing that women have written stories since the beginning of the genre. Women have written fantasy and science fiction and told countless stories and examined other worlds in order to examine themselves and the world around them, to teach, to inspire, and to simply have fun. Women have always been here, writing, and there should never be another time in which people claim not to see us and see the worlds we’ve made and the stories we’ve told.

We’ve built a list containing a multitude of women’s voices and we hope everyone enjoys it. But we’re not done yet. Again this year, we want you to come share ten science fiction and fantasy books by women writers that you love with us until the end of April. They can be all new books, released since we did this last. They can be older titles. They can be a mixture of old and new. They can be books already on the list, or books not yet represented, as long as you love them. Visit the Recommend Books page to search for up to ten science fiction and fantasy books by women and submit them.

After the end of this month’s event, the curated submissions will be published as a new 2014 list that will later be merged with the 2013 list to make our list even more representative of the women writing in the field. Come help us continue to crowdsource the best list of SFF women writers. 🙂