Clarion West Write-a-thon

This is the third year I participate in Clarion West's Write-a-thon event that is held during the six-week workshop. What is Clarion West? It is a non-profit organization that is behind the highly competitive annual short story workshop for aspiring writers of speculative fiction genres, held in Seattle, WA. Clarion West also organizes year-round events for writers and readers -- such as the famous Write-a-thon -- and is truly the fabric that connects a community of writers, readers, fans here in Seattle, all across the US, and internationally.
Write-a-thon is a fundraising event and a platform for writers, beginners to professionals, to introduce themselves and show their work, as well as impose writing deadlines and discipline upon themselves, should they still need any. I take part in Write-a-thon because I am a graduate of the Clarion West workshop and because I owe so much to the workshop and the community that makes it possible. Please visit the Write-a-thon page to meet writers like Elizabeth Bear, Eileen Gunn, Andrea Hairston, and many others, including my friends and classmates Randy Henderson, Kris Millering, Emily C. Skaftun, Lucas Johnson, Joel Walsh, D. Elizabeth Wasden, Katrina S. Forrest, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Vicki Saunders. See what they are up to, and sponsor them.

My Readercon 2014 schedule

Readercon 25 schedule is out! The full schedule can be downloaded from Readercon program

My part of it is as follows:

Friday, July 11

Panels

1:00 PM:    The Difference Between Magic and Science  with  Max Gladstone, Lev Grossman, Andrea Hairston, Kenneth Schneyer (leader)

3:00 PM     Russian Traditions of Science Fiction and Fantasy with  Michael Kandel

 

Presentation 

9:00 PM      Parallels Between the Evolution of Human Language and Genetics.
Reprising my 2013 talk at the Art+Science salon at the Tacoma Art Museum, I will give a popular science-level overview of parallels between evolution of human languages and human genomes/epigenomes as tools of expression and communication. The presentation will be based in serious academic literature on the subject, though will also aim to provoke imagination and just have some intellectual fun.

Sunday July 13

Reading

12:00 PM    EM    I will read  from the novel The Age of Ice and unpublished work .

A new story out in Devilfish Review

My short story Rohrschach Redemption is out online in Devilfish Review magazine.
The story's idea originated at a workshop taught by  John Crowley.

Readercon 2014!

I am looking forward to participating in this year's Readercon, a conference on imaginative literature held in Burlington, MA on July10-13. I will be on a couple of panels and will have a reading. Details to follow.

Allow me to introduce -- Anna Kashina

She is a mother of two, a cellular biologist, a fantasy novelist, a friend of twenty plus years without whom I would not have read The Lord of the Rings when I did, and not seen Star Wars when I did; a girl, unchanged by time, at whom I marvel to this day because she is a marvelous person —and because she is still a mystery to me.
The credit for starting this friendship goes to a lab course of immunology. Students had to pair up to do the experiments of the course, so she and I formed a team. We performed classical hands-ons, like letting an antigen and an antibody diffuse towards each other through a slab of jelly, and observing formation of arc-shaped zones where the two met and, if they were a match, formed a precipitate. We too proved a good match.
We studied for our finals together and walked our dogs together. We pierced our ears together. We each landed in our first serious relationship at about the same time, and went through the requisite ups and downs. We both were taking swings at writing fiction, first in our native language, Russian, and later, in English. We went to each other’s weddings. More than once. 
And yet we are so different — ah, let me count the ways. I can’t imagine why she’d prefer instant coffee to espresso. I had picked up martial arts when she’d picked up ballroom dancing (and went on to become a far better dancer than I — a martial artist). Many-many years ago, before Peter Jackson’s movies, we almost had a fight about the physical appearance of hobbits. And did I mention? She writes fantasy. I don’t, I’m pretty sure. But let me tell you: many years from now, we joke, we may just end up moving in together as two old blue-hairs. We’ll probably fight about hobbits, among other things. It would be fun.
Today, in anticipation of the release of the first book of Anna’s new Majat Code trilogy, Blades of the Old Empire (Angry Robot Books, Feb 25, 2014), and as media outlets talk about the book, allow me the liberty to talk about the author.

The Age of Ice is on the Locus magazine 2013 reading list and on the Ballot

I am very happy to announce that my novel The Age of Ice has made the  Locus Magazine's 2013 recommended reading list in the First Novels category!
And not only that, it is also included in the ballot. If you read the novel and enjoyed it, please take a moment  to go to the Poll and do some voting.

Thanks!

A review of Karen Joy Fowler's novel We are all completely beside ourselves

There are books that tell stories that could have happened. And then there are books that make you yearn that the story they tell, however fantastic, had in fact happened — as if without it, without these particular events and without this human being who’d experienced them and now tells her tale, there is something amiss in the world. The only disbelief you suspend is the one where you can’t believe you’ll never meet this character in your real life.

Karen Joy Fowler’s latest novel is one of such books. Written as a memoir and filled with references to actual events and facts, the story balances on the verge of “happened” just as the narrator, Rosemary, balances on the verge of a grand disclosure that will expose her as she is, with all her idiosyncrasies, to the whole world.

In a nutshell, the novel imagines the fate of one of the experiments actually performed around nineteen seventies (if I am not mistaken) in the US, and pursuing comparative analysis of human and primate development. In such an experiment, a human and an ape infant are reared together from the very early age on, they are treated in the same way, as if both are human; they know each other intimately, they communicate with each other using sign language. It is researchers’ hypothesis that the ape child may be advanced, behaviorally, closer to the level of a human child. It was the actual outcome, at least in some cases, that the human child began to acquire behavioral traits more reminiscent of an ape. Rosemary Cooke, the heroine and the narrator of the novel is one of such children. She spent the first five years of her life with a sister who happened to be a chimpanzee.