Fall News from Aqueduct Press

The Waterdancer's World
by L. Timmel Duchamp
Out now

$20.00 (paperback)
$7.95 (e-book)
Buy now

We're very pleased to announce that Aqueduct publishing director L. Timmel Duchamp's new novel, The Waterdancer's World, is just being released in trade paperback and e-book editions.

Humans have been struggling to live on Frogmore for almost five centuries, adapting themselves to punishing gravity and the deadly mistflowers that dominate its ecology. Financier Inez Gauthier, patron of the arts and daughter of the general commanding the planet's occupation forces, dreams of eliminating the mistflowers that make exploitation of the planet's natural wealth so difficult and impede her father's efforts to crush the native insurgency. Fascinated by the new art-form of waterdancing created by Solstice Balalzalar celebrating the planet's indigenous lifeforms, Inez assumes that her patronage will be enough to sustain Solstice's art even as she ruthlessly pursues windfall profits at the expense of all that has made waterdancing possible.

"Aqueduct editor Duchamp (Never at Home) raises some hard questions about society's responsibility for the well-being of its most marginalized people, suggesting that the powerful create the underclasses and keep them powerless for the sake of economic convenience. Readers will find much to ponder un Duchamp's provocative ideas about culture and colonization."
—Publishers Weekly

"The interplay of emotions unfolds on both an individual and a mass level, and the role of art in human history becomes a major theme. This author's work is almost always just a bit outside the mainstream of science fiction, and that is I think part of the reason that it is so often, as in this case, intensely appealing."
—Critical Mass, Don D'Ammassa.

Strange Horizons
Fund Drive Results

WisCon Chronicles
Call for Materials

We would like to remind you all that the call for submissions is still open for this year's volume of The WisCon Chronicles, subtitled Trials by Whiteness and edited by Jaymee Goh. A full description of what Jaymee is looking for is available on our blog. Submissions and pitches should be in by October 31, and pitched articles, by November 15.

Carmilla, the Lesbian Vampire

As part of their month-long Halloween special, Atlas Obscura has published Mariana Zapata's enjoyable article about the story of Carmilla, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's classic novella and whom they define as "the lesbian vampire story that came before Dracula." Though we know Carmilla is certainly not the only vampire with said "Sapphic undertones," we are looking forward to contributing to her legend by publishing Cynthia Ward's steampunk novella The Adventure of the Incognita Countess, forthcoming in 2017 in our Conversation Pieces series.

Aqueduct Press
goes to Eurocon

Associate Editor Arrate Hidalgo will be traveling to Barcelona next week, the very first Spanish city to host Eurocon. Arrate will be representing Aqueduct at an international small press gathering and promoting Lola Robles's novella of imminent release Monteverde: Memoirs of an Interstellar Linguist, in conversation with the author and her translator Lawrence Schimel on a panel about queer SF/F in Spain and beyond.

Review of Karen Heuler's
Other Places

As part of his project of posting one review a day for 2016, writer and editor Michael Czyzniejewski has written a short but positive review of "The Apartments," one of the short stories featured in Karen Heuler's Other Places, our new Conversation Piece collecting her poetry and fiction. "The story surprised me, it scared me, and at the end, it satisfied me. 'The Apartments' is a great piece of fiction .... Other Places is a menagerie of voices, styles, and philosophies, a book that so far, I’ve enjoyed very much."

"The Fantastic Ursula K. Le Guin"
by Julie Phillips

We encourage you to put some minutes aside for this piece by Julie Phillips for The New Yorker, a warm and thoughtful look at Le Guin's life and work, her imagination, upbringing, and profound influence in the shaping of contemporary science fiction and its interaction with the mainstream. "Keeping an ambivalent distance from the centers of literary power," writes Phillips, "she makes room in her work for other voices. She has always defended the fantastic, by which she means not formulaic fantasy or 'McMagic' but the imagination as a subversive force. 'Imagination, working at full strength, can shake us out of our fatal, adoring self-absorption,' she has written, 'and make us look up and see—with terror or with relief—that the world does not in fact belong to us at all.'”