Guest Post: Genrewise — October 2019

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"Free Audio Fiction, Spiderverse Sequel & Game of Thrones Updates - Genrewise #13" (Watch on YouTube)

Hi, I’m Claire and welcome to Genrewise, news from the world of SFF.

I am recording on November 2nd and today we're going to start by looking at awards news, then we'll move on to books, fandom news, then film and TV news, and finally IRL news. For every item that I'm talking about I'm going to link some extra information & more in-depth articles in the description box below so you can always check there for further reading.

First up in awards news, we have a new name for the award formerly known as the Tiptree. It is now the Otherwise Award. There is a really long post on the award website in which the Motherboard gives a lot more detail on the process by which they came to this decision, including a number of testimonials from either side of the argument. It's a really fascinating read so I would highly recommend checking it out. It is linked in the description box below, of course. Personally, I absolutely love the new name. I think Otherwise fits the ethos of this award very well, and I'm obviously a big fan of that particular wordplay construction.

Next up the winners of the 2019 British Fantasy Awards were just announced at FantasyCon. Jen Williams won Best Fantasy Novel for The Bitter Twins, while Catriona Ward took home Best Horror Novel for Little Eve and Aliette de Bodard won Best Novella for The Tea Master and The Detective.

Congratulations are also in order for the winners of the Aurora Awards for Canadian SFF, including Kate Heartfield who won Best Novel for Armed in Her Fashion, Fonda Lee who won Best YA Novel for Crossfire, and Kelly Robson who won Best Short Fiction for Gods, Monsters, and The Lucky Peach. Congrats to them and all the other winners, the full list of winners for both Awards can be found in the description box below.

First up in books, we have a new audio-only horror anthology of short stories called Come Join Us by the Fire, featuring writing by Chuck Wendig, Victor LaValle, Brooke Bolander, Alyssa Wong, Kij Johnson and many, many more. It came out from Tor Books' new sister imprint Nightfire in mid-October, so all of the stories are available to download as free individual audio books. However, they are only available in the US and Canada and because they were released in conjunction with Google Play Books, it looks like you can only get them from the Google Play store.

Award-winning author and co-founder of io9, Charlie Jane Anders, has just announced her first short-story collection. Ever Greater Mistakes will include the Hugo-award-winning story Six Months, Three Days, as well as many stories tackling queerness, the absurdity of real life, climate change, and the dangers of messing with a cult that worships a giant space testicle. It comes out in early 2021 from Tor Books.

Next up, serialised fiction publishers Serial Box continue to innovate with a new serial from a host of amazing SFF writers. Embodied is a chilling story about transferring the human mind to android bodies and—how cool is that? It was written in the style of the parlour game Exquisite Corpse. This means each author wrote their chapter based only on the initial prompt and the chapter directly before theirs. And if this weren’t cool enough, this serial features writing by Madeline Ashby, Gwenda Bond, Sarah Gailey, Max Gladstone, S.L. Huang, Mary Robinette Kowal, Mur Lafferty, Malka Older, and Fran Wilde and it’s based on a prompt by Yoon Ha Lee. If you’d like to try it out, Embodied Season One is out now & you can read it or listen to it entirely for free through the Serial website or their app.

Next up, Orbit Books will be publishing a new fantasy trilogy by M. A. Carrick, the pen name for the writing duo of Alyc Helms and Marie Brennan, the author of the Memoirs of Lady Trent series. The Rook and The Rose is the story of Ren, a con artist determined to trick her way into one of the noble houses of the City of Dreams, hoping to secure hers and her sister’s future. We don’t have any titles or release dates yet for individual books but we do know that the Rook of the series title is a legendary vigilante which sounds very intriguing to me.

Tor Books have also acquired The Glass Immortals, a new epic fantasy series from Powder Mage author Brian McClellan, set in a world in which there is magic, but the magic is dying. We don’t know yet how many books this new series will be, but the first book is titled In the Shadow of Lightning and it is due out in spring 2022. Wow! I think this is my first 2022 release announcement on Genrewise yet.

Next up, Orbit Books will be publishing a new space opera trilogy from Alex White, the author of A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe, which I’ve heard great things about. This new trilogy is all about humanity’s last, desperate stand against an alien race of giant robot AI from space, who’ve already destroyed most of everything on Earth. And now Earth might just be saved by...music? We don’t have a title yet but the first book in the trilogy will be out in 2021.

Granta Books have acquired The Manningtree Witches, an "electrifying" novel from award-winning poet and writer A.K. Blakemore, all about the witch trials of 16th century England. The novel follows the quiet and resourceful daughter of one of the accused women and it will be out in spring 2021.

Tor.com Publishing has bought two new novels from War Girls author Tochi Onyebuchi, and they both sound really cool. First up, we have Goliath, a post-apocalyptic epic in the vein of Station Eleven, focusing on a cast of diverse characters living around the once-thriving metropolis of New Haven, Connecticut. The second book is currently untitled, but they are pitching it as a fantasy Get Out meets The Secret History, which sounds amazing and also terrifying.

And finally, we’ve got a couple of cover reveals, starting with this really vibrant, vintage looking cover for Lindsay Ellis’ upcoming sci-fi novel Axiom’s End, which comes out on July 21, 2020. The cover design is by Rob Grom, who’s the art director for Ellis’ publisher’s St Martin’s Press.

We’ve also got a cover for This Coven Won’t Break by Isabel Sterling, which is the sequel to her YA novel These Witches Don’t Burn which I really, really enjoyed. This cover keeps the same aesthetic as the first book but displays a new character we’ve yet to meet; it was designed by Dana Li, with illustrations by Amy Blackwell and photo illustrations by Travis Commeau. And the book comes out on June 2, 2020, from Razorbill.

First up in fandom news, nominations are open for the 2020 Going Under Fan Fund or GUFF. This is a fan fund that helps SFF fans travel between Europe and Australasia for SF conventions, like Worldcon, Natcon and Eastercon. Now with Worldcon 2020 happening in Wellington, New Zealand, I suspect this is going to be a highly contested GUFF race. The way it works is that fans who are established in SF convention fandom can nominate themselves for the fund - the nomination period is open until January 10, 2020 - and then there will be a voting period in which other fans can donate to the fund and vote for who will ultimately win the entire fund. If you’re interested in participating, do check out the rules linked below! If you’re in the US and wondering how you can apply for the same type of help to travel to Wellington, check out GUFF’s sister fan fund DUFF, the Down Under Fan Fund, which helps fans travel between the US and Australasia - the nominations aren’t open yet but they should be shortly.

Sign-ups are currently open for this year’s Yuletide challenge. This is an annual rare-fandom gift exchange hosted on the Hugo-award winning Archive Of Our Own in which participants agree to write a story of a thousand words minimum for an assigned recipient in return for receiving a story from another assigned writer. You can specify what fandoms you’d like to write in and then what fandoms you’d like to receive work in, and these don’t have to be the same. I’ll leave a link to the FAQ if you’d like to check it out below. You’ve got until Monday November 4th at 9am UTC to sign up for this year’s Yuletide.

Now onto film and TV, we've got very exciting news that just dropped last night as I was finishing up the script for this episode. We are getting a sequel to Sony's multi award-winning multiverse masterpiece, Spider-Man: Into The Spider-verse! Literally all we know about it at this point is it comes out on April 8th 2022, but that's enough for me to get pretty excited about it.

Next up, Amazon is developing a series based on the novel Ninth House, by Leigh Bardugo. This is her first adult novel, a very recent release that’s had a lot of hype around it, and it is set at an alternate Yale, complete with secret societies, magical secrets and ghosts galore. We don’t have much more detail on this yet, but we do know that Leigh Bardugo herself is attached to write the adaptation and executive produce.

Lionsgate has bought the rights to adapt all nine books in Jacqueline Carey’s alternate history series Kushiel’s Legacy, and let me tell you, that news has caused quite a lot of excitement on my Twitter feed! It is very early in the development process, with no news on casting or production dates yet, but Carey herself has said they’re working towards a TV series on Starz.

Next up, we've got casting news for HBO Max's upcoming adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, a post-apocalyptic story about attempting to rebuild and reimagine the world anew, striving for more than mere survival. Mackenzie Davis, who’s previously appeared in Black Mirror and The Martian, will play Kirsten, one of the performers in a post-apocalyptic Shakespearean troupe. Himesh Patel, of EastEnders fame, will play Jeevan, an unemployed lost soul who must become a leader after the pandemic strikes.

Speaking of HBO Max, they have recently announced that all of Studio Ghibli’s movies will be streaming exclusively on their platform starting in 2020. This, of course, includes award-winning and beloved animated films like Howl’s Moving Castle, My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. This will be the first time that any of Studio Ghibli’s titles are available to stream and as far as we know, it will be US only, since it looks like HBO Max is not going to be launching in the UK at all.

Next up, we’ve finally got a release date for Netflix's upcoming adaptation of The Witcher and it is really, really soon! According to the new extended trailer that just dropped, the show will be available to stream from December 20th, 2019, and you can of course find that trailer linked in the description box below.

Next up, we have some updates on the many Game Of Thrones prequel shows HBO have...or had in the works. One previously greenlit prequel project has reportedly been axed, and in any case it has disappeared from HBO's website. The maybe-cancelled show focused on the ancient history of Westeros, specifically The Long Night. It starred Naomi Watts in the lead role and was helmed by Kingsman producer and writer Jane Goldman. A pilot was filmed for this but rumour has it that it was not very good.

Only a few hours after these rumours broke out, HBO confirmed that the first official Game Of Thrones spin-off series will be House of the Dragon. They have ordered an initial 10 episode run of this prequel, which will be set 300 years before the events of Game of Thrones and will of course, focus on the rise of the Targaryen dynasty. Let's hope they've got a decent CGI budget for all them dragons.

And finally, former Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss will not be making a new Star Wars trilogy after all. In their announcement, D&D cited time constraints as their reason for quitting Star Wars, saying they wished to focus on their Netflix projects and wouldn't be able to "do justice" to both at the same time.

Moving swiftly on to real life news, one cannot help but marvel at the timing of this announcement, which comes hot off the heels of a Q&A panel Benioff & Weiss did at a film festival, discussing their work on Thrones, their total lack of any knowledge of how to make a TV show prior to Thrones, their efforts to minimise the fantasy elements from the books and their unwillingness to work collaboratively with other writers, something that is pretty much unheard of in TV. So this panel was live tweeted and the thread went somewhat viral, with many people objecting to D&D's ignorance and misunderstanding of the source material, as well as their complete lack of acknowledgement of the massive amount of privilege that allowed them to make this show in the first place when they say themselves they had no idea what they were doing.

Going back to our discussion of The Long Night prequel for a second—that was cancelled for having a bad pilot but we know the original series pilot was notoriously awful; Benioff & Weiss have talked about that at length, too. Yet they were allowed to continue making the series as complete unknowns, while a female led show with an experienced female showrunner on this massive property was axed. And look, there's no way to tell whether The Long Night would have been a good show or not. Maybe it would have been awful, but we'll never know because women can't get by just being mediocre in Hollywood.

So that’s it! This was Genrewise. I hope you enjoyed it and please let me know your thoughts in the comments below. Which of those upcoming books are you most excited for? Are you a Ninth House, Kushiel, or Station Eleven fan? How do you feel about the upcoming adaptations? Did you see that Benioff and Weiss thread; what did you think of it? Those are important questions and I want to know your answers!

If you like the show, please share it around. I work really hard on it and I’d love for as many people as possible to see it. Thanks for watching & I hope you’ll join me again in a month’s time for more science-fiction, fantasy and fandom news.

★ Claire is a Booktuber and the producer of Radio Free Fandom. You can find her on Twitter at ClaireRousseau.