December CSFF tour: a semi-relevant post

Giants, sorcerors, talking birds, magic cloaks... what is this, a Harry Potter post?

Well, no, actually, because all these things appear in the Birthright Project, a Christian science fiction series. It does have numerous fantasy elements in it, and is aimed at the same teenage audience as young Harry, but at the same time blurs the line between sf and fantasy.

Set on what appears to be post-apocalyptic Earth, the sorcerors are using what remains of science to create transmogrified creatures - including some unfortunate humans, who become the even more unfortunate gigants. The birds don't really talk, but can be understood by the birthrighters, and therefore act as a sort of messenger service. Like a carrier pigeon with better security. And the magic cloaks? Well, it seems God has been good enough to provide the birthrighters with a magic spindle, with which they can create 'out of time' fabric, which renders them invisible, impervious to the passage of time, or, apparently, whatever the plot seems to require. Arguably this is a cop-out, but this is Christian spec-fic, which by its nature assumes the existence of an all-powerful God who can, should he see fit, produce from thin air a talking donkey, a never-ending Mars bar, or even a magic spindle. So why not.

Anyway, I promised semi-relevance, and semi-relevant I intend to be.

As is my usual slacker way, I haven't read the book in question. I have, on this occasion, read the first book in the series, Outriders, on which this little intro to the world of Trackers has been based.

So I suppose it would be semi-relevant to add a few words about Outriders.

Well, it's got post-apocalyptic decay, genetic mutants and hints of sci-fi technology hidden in the ark. It's got sword and sorcery coming out its ears. It's got angels and demons battling over the lives of our heroes. In fact, you'd be hard pushed to squeeze much more into a Christian science-fantasy story, really. Oh, and don't forget to throw in some teen angst, questioned faith, and romantic dilemmas. That's not to say it suffers from cramming all that in. Most of the time it all seems to fit together in a way that makes sense, and the action clips along at a decent enough pace to keep the interest up.

Young adult novels such as this are not normally my thing, but that is actually the only reason I can come up with not to go away and read Trackers some time soon.

Is it that time again already?

Hello? Um. Is this thing working? Right. Where did I leave everything? OK. Sorry, I took rather longer off than I expected. Still didn't finish that NaNo mind. Tsk, eh?

Anyway, here I am, ready for the final day of the December CSFF blog tour. Ooops. Still, seems as good a time as any to drag myself back into Blogoland, especially since I have something semi-relevant to post this time round (shock!).

This month the tour is looking at Trackers, the second volume in the Birthright Project sequence by Kathryn Mackel. So here, as a sort of prelude, is a list of links. (This is not the semi-relevant thing.)

Kathryn Mackel's website
Birthright Project website
Trackers on Amazon
Outriders, volume one of the series, on Amazon

and, of course, your fellow blog tourists:
Jim Black
Jackie Castle
Valerie Comer
Frank Creed
Gene Curtis
Chris Deanne
Janey DeMeo
April Erwin
Beth Goddard
Mark Goodyear
Todd Michael Greene
Karen Hancock
Elliot Hanowski
Katie Hart
Sherrie Hibbs
Sharon Hinck
Joleen Howell
Jason Joyner
Karen and at Karen¹s myspace
Oliver King
Tina Kulesa
Lost Genre Guild
Kevin Lucia and The Bookshelf Reviews 2.0 - The Compendium
Terri Main
Rachel Marks
Shannon McNear
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Caleb Newell
Eve Nielsen
John Otte
Cheryl Russel
Hannah Sandvig
Mirtika Schultz
James Somers
Stuart Stockton
Steve Trower
Speculative Faith
Chris Walley
Daniel I. Weaver

An apology to Landon Snow

Mr Snow,

I know you are more than worthy of comment here on my humble little blog. But the thing is, you see, your timing's all wrong. It's November - it's NaNoWriMo, and I'm doing really badly at keeping the pace with that too.

I've had a poorly one year old to look after, which meant I had at least a day's work to catch up on in NaNo & blogging time. And then she gave whatever it was to me, so I was completely useless over the weekend. I even went to bed before Torchwood. That's how bad it is.

So, I'm sorry, Mr Snow, that I don't really have time to comment on your exploits.

Apologies also to R K Mortenson, for not being able to plug his latest book.

Don't worry though, there are a few people out in Bloggoland doing just that. Lucky escape for me there are more reliable folks like Jim Black, Jackie Castle, Valerie Comer, Frank Creed, Gene Curtis, Chris Deanne, Janey DeMeo, April Erwin, Beth Goddard, Todd Michael Greene, Leathel Grody, Karen Hancock, Katie Hart, Sherrie Hibbs, Sharon Hinck, Joleen Howell, Jason Joyner, Karenee, Oliver King, Tina Kulesa, the entire Lost Genre Guild, Kevin Lucia, Rachel Marks, Shannon McNear, Rebecca LuElla Miller, Caleb Newell, John Otte, Cheryl Russel, Hannah Sandvig, Mirtika Schultz, Stuart Stockton, those nice Speculative Faith people, my nemesis Chris Walley, and of course Daniel I. Weaver.

Further apologies to anyone who has just read all this.

Sorry.

Quick NaNo note

As I may have mentioned, I took the lunatic step of signing up for this, and in fact got off to a good start. Whether I'll keep that up or not is a different matter.

Anyway, if I'm not around much over the next few weeks, well, you probably won't notice any difference, but this time there is a reason.

I'll be mucking about in the Bermuda Triangle of fiction that lies between Jasper Fforde, Robert Rankin and Douglas Adams.

So far Per Ardua ad Chipping Sodbury has an impressive 4004 words - some of which actually make some kind of sense - and occasional snippets will be posted here, so as not to lower the tone of this blog. The prologue is there now.

...and Angels

What first came to mind for "angels" is the moment when Kosh reveals himself to save Sheridan, and he looks like an angelic being. But that's only because Mir jumped the gun yesterday. Nice to get a Bab5 reference occasionally though.

Anyway, Angels. Messengers of an almighty God, purveyors of Providence, proof of the unprovable, denizens of a supernatural spiritual reality. So goes the DKA blurb for them, anyway. And in Christian fiction you can put them anywhere (well, within reason). I've got them in Countless as the Stars.

Spiritual warfare made real was pretty much the mainstay of Christian spec-fic a few years ago thanks to Frank Peretti, and still crops up here and there, if usually in a smaller, less in your face way.

I've seen sf stories that take the Nephilim as their inspiration - would those 'sons of God' who paired off with the daughters of men have been angels? Or aliens? Are angels aliens? Are aliens angels?

Oh, my heads spinning with wacky ideas again. And that's before we even mention fallen angels. Is it NaNo time yet?

But as far as science fiction and angels go, I reckon the Simpsons had the start of a good story.

Now, all that remains for thos month's blog tour is for me to give you a little nudge in the direction of these other participants:
Jim Black Jackie Castle Valerie Comer Kameron M. Franklin Beth Goddard Todd Michael Greene Leathel Grody Karen Hancock Elliot Hanowski Katie Hart Sherrie Hibbs Joleen Howell Jason Joyner Karen and at Karen's myspace Oliver King Tina Kulesa Kevin Lucia Rachel Marks Shannon McNear Rebecca LuElla Miller Caleb Newell Cheryl Russel Mirtika Schultz Stuart Stockton Speculative Faith Frank Creed Christina Deanne Lost Genre Guild John Otte

...Knights...

Knights in science fiction?

Um.... errr....

With swords and everything?

Hmmmm.....

What, some sort of laser sword, perhaps?

Ummmm.....

No. Next thing you know you'll be giving them magic powers and stuff. It'll never work.

Dragons...

OK, we know that Dragons, Knights and Angels is just a name, and that stories appearing in it don't have to feature dragons, knights, or angels. After all, as Johne Cook says in the DKA vision, that would be silly. Which really is tempting for someone like me who happens rather to like silly.

But that's another post. Or perhaps a DKA submission. Or a NaNo project, even.

This is the blog tour, and an opportunity for me to take the subject and ramble off on a tangent. If you want to know about DKA, go off and read Mirathon. You want intelligent discussion sparked by the subject, Becky's got it. You want to try and cram dragons, knights and angels into sensible science fiction, well, I'll give that a go. But bear in mind, I do like silly.

So, dragons.

At first glimpse the exclusive domain of the fantasy tale, how do we get these mythical creatures to play a sensible role in science fiction?

This would be one of those areas where sf and fantasy overlap, as in Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern sequence. Here a world which wouldn't look out of place in a fantasy novel is created by colonists from Earth, who create a race of dragons by genetic manipulation. Sounds like science fiction to me.

As a child, I was briefly fascinated by the 'science' of dragons. The biology of how such a thing could actually exist. That was before I knew anything about biology, of course, like how boring the lessons were. But it is science, and if someone were to dig up a dragon's remains somewhere, you could have fun exploring the science of dragons. You could always dig up a live dragon, in a Reign of Fire sort of way.

So how do we bully all this into a Christian story? There's plenty of Biblical monsters to choose from - the Leviathon from Job, Jonah's big fish (well, have you ever seen a dragon?), and dragons (be they physical or metaphorical) in Revelation. You could throw Christians to the dragons like a Roman Emperor. And the 'dragon as a representation of general nastiness' theme was donw by Frank Peretti a while ago in The Oath.

'Here be dragons' they wrote on maps in days of yore, and who knows, maybe those early spacefarers will use the same phrase, harking back to their ancestors, to denote areas of as yet unexplained danger. The dragons could be anything. And that (he says, miraculously returning to the point) is the way DKA see them. Johne Cook says:

To my way of thinking, dragons represent the mystical, the unknown world, dangerous and magical and huge beyond reckoning.

And in science fiction, that leaves a lot for the imagination to play with.

Introducing the October CSFF blog tour

Yes, it's time for the increasingly popular CSFF blog tour again. This time round, a whole bunch of people will be commenting on the Christian spec-fic webzine Dragons, Knights and Angels. I'm on sort of a mission now to find out how any of those three entities wind up in science fiction stories - I'll report back tomorrow.

In the meantime, why not pop over and take a quick peek, then come back and see what these nice people have to say about it:
Jim Black
Jackie Castle
Valerie Comer
Kameron M. Franklin
Beth Goddard
Todd Michael Greene
Leathel Grody
Karen Hancock
Elliot Hanowski
Katie Hart
Sherrie Hibbs
Joleen Howell
Jason Joyner
Karen and at Karen¹s myspace
Oliver King
Tina Kulesa
Kevin Lucia
Rachel Marks
Shannon McNear
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Caleb Newell
Cheryl Russel
Mirtika Schultz
Stuart Stockton
Steve Trower
Speculative Faith
Frank Creed
Christina Deanne
Lost Genre Guild
John Otte

The recipe for perfect telly sf

• Take one of Joss Whedon's spare Hellmouths, and place under a British city. Say, Cardiff.
• Add one part X-Files and two parts Men in Black.
• Create a Scooby gang including at least one technical guru and one, um, Xander, led by a mysterious, handsome (apparently) stranger with a dark side. If he once died and came back mysteriously immortal, so much the better.
• Give them a Batcave, whose entrance is protected by a Somebody Else's Problem field from Hitchhikers.
• Place the mix into a pre-heated sf universe. (Note: Doctor Who is popular at the moment.)
• Make occasional throw-away references to this show, but do not depend on it.
• In fact, distance yourself from its key fanbase by taking a distinctly adult sf plot (say, Species) and plundering it for Episode 2.
• Before serving, take the name of the parent show and sprinkle the letters over the title sequence.

Enjoy Torchwood. I did.

miscellaneous bloggery 7

Yes I know. I'm copping out more frequently than I'm writing proper entries. So sue me.

But to stay remotely on topic, I like these, pointed out by Elliot recently. They just sent my little writer's mind into a bit of an idea-frenzy... maybe something new might be on the NaNo cards yet?

In the open space has some thoughts on another TV sf show that hasn't made it into my life yet, Battlestar Galactica.

If you haven't wandered over to The Lost Genre Guild yet, here's the link. (There I go, diverting my readers to somewhere that does this Christian sf comment thing so much better than me...)

And for a smile, Mir suggests The Town Drunk, and having just briefly perused a couple of stories, I have to agree. If I can knock up a faintly amusing Christmas story in the next two weeks, look out for me there in a couple of months... don't hold your breath though.

Maybe I should start a little series of Hitchhikers or Red Dwarf posts. I also might nick Becky's idea and explore the many sub-genres within science fiction (which I kind of started way back when, before I started running out of time to blog properly...)

What was I thinking...

...when I signed up for NaNoWriMo?

I was actually thinking I've got all these WIPs on the go, but none of them really seem to be going anywhere... so I thought I'd join in, in the hope that it would inspire me to knock one of these half finished ideas together into something approaching a usable first draft.

At the moment the idea I'm planning to use is the sequel to Countless as the Stars, but my main problem with this is that I only know it as 'the sequel' - it doesn't have a title, nor any sign of developing one any time soon. I can see myself getting hung up on that and not writing anything until I have a title...

So I may well have a change of heart in the next couple of weeks and pick one of my other ideas (most likely a comic fantasy, because they don't even have to make sense!). Most of them are little more than ideas and characters at the moment - I've titles without stories too, come to that - so either way the actual writing will be started from scratch.

I've never done a NaNo before either, so the whole thing is a new experience for me. Hopefully I won't get too involved in technicalities or forumming and forget to actually write anything.

My plan is to plot my NaNo progress on my other blog, so that I can continue uninterrupted coverage of Christanity in sf over here. But now that I write that, it also seems pretty unlikely.

Anyway, on the bookshelf, by popular demand (sort of) is near-future bilogical thriller with prophetic nuns The Patron Saint of Plagues. Expect a review sometime after NaNo.

So many books!

My copy of Firebird has arrived, and currently sits between Barth Anderson's The Patron Saint of Plagues and The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell.

Also on the reading list is a tatty second hand copy of Lord Foul's Bane, (The First Chronicle of Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever) by Stephen Donaldson, which I picked up cheap having had it recommended to me eons ago.

I haven't decided which to read first yet though. If anyone would like to suggest which they want to see a review of first, I'm open to a quick straw poll :)

miscellaneous bloggery 6

The sixth in an occasional series in which I realise I haven't posted here all week because it's my little girl's first birthday and I can't be bothered to come up with anything original to write about.

The new, David-Tennant-shaped Doctor Who has landed in the states. Mir looks forward to season three, and In The Open Space reviews the season opener. Did you guys not get the Christmas Invasion? Or are they saving it for Christmas, when it will be all out of sequence and not make any sense at all?

Oh yes, and in other Christian sf developments, the Armchair Theologian proposes a Christian version of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. I can't believe no-one thought of that before! (Notice how he and Carmen both mention Brian McLaren? Is it Brian McLaren week and I missed it or something?)

In other news, Mir mentioned haiku earlier, a largely irrelevant fact which I mention only because I like haiku too.

Normal service may potentially resume next week.

I'm Lost.

I can hardly believe I made it through the entire second series of Lost without mentioning it here. What with all the miraculous healings, that 'Man of science, man of faith' malarky, and all the rest of the philosophical musings that could have ensued, it could have kept me going for a while. But I'm sure I blinked during one episode and probably missed something vital and would have ended up looking a muppet anyway.

Still, now we know, they're not in purgatory, or in fact dead at all. Probably.

I should make a note to mention Lost a bit more when season three arrives.

Until then, I shall remain slightly confused by the whole business. Which is, of course, the whole point.

Doctor Who and the Spin-off invasion

First there was a K-9 spin-off - in about 1981, originally - but the latest K-9 Adventures seem to have gone very quiet just lately. (Probably because no-one recognised the tin dog.)

Then there was Billie Piper: Earth Defence, which died a death when Billie didn't want to do it. Duh!

Now, Sarah Jane Smith (who was also in the original K-9 spin-off, of course) is going to battle evil with a 13-year-old neighbour for CBBC.

But most importantly, coming very soon (to me, at least :p ) is Torchwood, a proper grown-up spin-off, which sounds a bit like the X-Files filmed in Wales.

And in other news, Buffy Season 8 is set to arrive in March. Hooray! Er, but only in comic book form. Hooray, sort of.

Until then, it's endless Doctor Who reruns and Angel on DVD for me...

Two sides to every story

OK, so, I've been rummaging through Edenstar's virtual box of books, and - hooray! - found that Christian SF is not quite the non-entity it sometimes seems (as Stuart so rightly pointed out yesterday).

In the space of a few minutes I have found time travel, alternate history, space travel, a cyber-thriller-type-thing and what almost looks like a space opera... who'da thunk it? At that was just a scratch of the surface, a few random picks I may not otherwise have come across. There is also plenty more that I have heard of, but have yet to read; and a wider selection of stuff by some authors I am aware of - I really must check out Bill Myers, for instance.

So, you may well ask, where is the downside to all this fabulous Christian sf?

I would have thought that was obvious. Turns out all my most original ideas have already been done!

Continue your tour here:
Jim Black Jackie Castle Valerie Comer Bryan Davis Beth Goddard Leathel Grody Karen Hancock Elliot Hanowski Katie Hart Sherrie Hibbs Sharon Hinck Joleen Howell Jason Joyner Tina Kulesa Kevin Lucia Rachel Marks Shannon McNear Rebecca LuElla Miller Cheryl Russel Mirtika Schultz Stuart Stockton Speculative Faith

I'm not bitter. No, I'm really not. Honest.

But I do think I have a valid point.

And my point is this: Edenstar books say they have discontinued their own shop in order to concentrate on their database, so that they can "expand the list to include out-of-print and hard-to-find titles". Provided, apparently, that they are listed on amazon.com.

Which is fine as far as it goes, and at risk of getting booted off the tour (erk!), my gripe is not with Edenstar as much as with amazon, who don't make it easy (or cheap) for an impoverished UK self-pubber like, well, for instance, this nice chap, to get their hard-to-find title listed.

I managed to get a listing on amazon.co.uk - admittedly the cover disappeared a while ago - but they picked it up just for having an ISBN... which, apparently, isn't as international as the 'I' might suggest.

Anyway, before I get any more sidetracked onto the woes of self-publishing, my point is this: as good as the database is on Edenstar, it is restricted to publications available on amazon in the US. If the owners are happy with that, fair enough, it's their website after all. But if they want to try and develop a comprehensive and definitive list of Christian spec-fic, they are welcome to drop me a line ;)

In the meantime, for all that's happening on the UK CSFF scene*, one stop is all you'll need... for everything else, there's Edenstar.

And if there's anyone in the US with an amazon marketplace account that wants to be my agent, let me know...


*that hasn't been picked up my amazon.com, Edenstar, or a CBA publisher. Or someone else.

Is it that time again already?

Yep, it's the Christian SFF blog tour again... and this month we'll be visiting Edenstar Books, a reference site for Christian themed science fiction, fantasy and games.

I've had a bit of a browse through the books section (in anticipation of finishing the five novels currently awaiting my attention) and, although the site doesn't offer any disctinction between science fction and fantasy, managed to find a few intriguing sf novels from the titles and the first couple of lines of blurb, which is all you can see on the browse pages. Some books have full reviews by Edenstar, but this seems to be a fairly small percentage of the 600+ items listed on the site (and who's got time to read that many books?).

There does seem to be a good mix of new and old; well-known titles and obscure self-published ones; and includes some titles published for the mainstream but with serious Christian themes.

Plenty to explore, then; I'll try to pluck one or two interesting gems from their pages tomoorow.

Until then, other bloggers sampling the delights of Edenstar this week include:
Jim Black Jackie Castle Valerie Comer Bryan Davis Beth Goddard Leathel Grody Karen Hancock Elliot Hanowski Katie Hart Sherrie Hibbs Sharon Hinck Jason Joyner Tina Kulesa Kevin Lucia Rachel Marks Shannon McNear Rebecca LuElla Miller Cheryl Russel Mirtika Schultz Stuart Stockton Speculative Faith

A slight return

Well, it seems the world can never have too many blogs, so I have returned to the blogosphere. I suppose a British eye on Christian spec-fic is still a pretty unusual thing, so I still have a point. Hurrah!

Anyway, what's been going on since I last stopped by here...

Well, if you're a regular here you will no doubt already have been to where the map ends. It's booklist should keep me in reading material for a while (once I get most of them shipped across the Atlantic), but there are some notable exceptions. ;)

It's appearance led to some interesting thoughts from Elliot on Christian evangelical fiction. If he's right, maybe I have been too influenced by this ''conservative evangelical American Christian" ideal for UK publishers? It's not a thought I relish, but I was writing for the CBA audience. Which, of course, doesn't exist anywhere except the US.

On the subject of CBA publishers, Allen of Entropy Gate fame has a few choice words to say about violence in Christian fiction.

And elsewhere in sf news, it seems the Trek people haven't learnt anything from Lucas' folly...

Is anyone missing me?

Only, my pooter's been on the blink lately, so I haven't been able to post anything half decent. Or indeed at all until now.

But with Christian spec-fic blogs and websites springing up left right and centre, it seems like you can all carry on without me ok. Maybe my work here is done?