Roberto Mendes interviews Jason Sizemore (Apex Publisher)

Dear ISF readers,

It is with great pleasure that the ISF publishes today an interview with Jason Sizemore (Apex Publisher) about a series of books Apex publishes focusing on international SF titled The Apex Book of World SF and The Apex Book of World SF 2, both edited by Lavie Tidhar!

Also, there is a Book Giveaway coming up in cooperation with Apex. We will be offering everybody the opportunity to win a paperback of The Apex Book of World SF and The Apex Book of World SF 2!

And last but not the least, ISF will publish tomorrow the short story “Zombie Lenin” by Ekaterina Sedia, which was published in The Apex Book of World SF 2!

 Here is a brief introduction about Apex Publications and The Apex Book of World SF:

Apex Publications is a small press publisher based out of Lexington, KY dedicated to producing exemplary science fiction, horror, fantasy, and nonfiction. Their catalog includes anthologies such as the Dark Faith and The Apex Book of World SF series, novels and novellas like the upcoming What Makes You Die by Tom Piccirilli, nonfiction such as Starve Better by Nick Mamatas, and the Hugo nominated Apex Magazine.

Lauriat, the World Fantasy Awards and International Speculative Fiction – Roberto Mendes interviews Charles Tan

Dear ISF readers,

We are proud to offer you an Interview with Charles Tan (World Fantasy Award nominee). 

Don’t miss the opportunity to read what Charles has to say about a variety of topics, such as his new Filipino-Chinese Anthology of Speculative Fiction,  his nomination for the World Fantasy Awards, his view on the International Speculative Fiction scene  and much more…

Roberto Mendes

Editor in Chief

Hi Charles, You seem to have been very busy: a nomination, for the second year running, for the World Fantasy Award (for the Bibliophile Stalker) and you have just released your new anthology, Lauriat: A Filipino-Chinese Speculative Fiction Anthology. Congratulations! Really well done! Lets start by the nomination, How does it feel to be nominated for such a special award?

I’m honored, especially for a relatively unknown person like myself to represent both the Philippines and the contributions of blogging to the genre.

And what is the relevance of such a nomination for you?

Again, I’m honored and thrilled, but the honest answer is that life goes on as usual, regardless of the award nomination or not. Various projects are still underway, and I continue to do the various blogging that I do. It helps with the promotion to have “World Fantasy Award nominee” attached but aside from that, we do the work that we do not because we think it will win us awards, but because this is what we’re passionate about.

Cheryl Morgan interviews Anne Leinonen

Dear ISF readers: We are back!

We will start publishing new short stories and articles as soon as possible but, until then, Cheryl Morgan offers us the opportunity to get to know more about Anne Leinonen (Finland) and her work.  Anne is a very important Finish writer and editor and a winner of multiple awards. So, wait no more: 

Cheryl Morgan interviews Anne Leinonen

This interview was conducted on board the MS Europa on the way back to mainland Finland after Åcon.

Cheryl: Anne, I know you mainly as a writer of excellent short stories, and also as a tireless promoter of your fellow Finnish writers through the Usva International magazine, but I gather now that you are starting to do very well with your novels.

Anne: I have been writing novels for ten years with my writing partner, Eija Lappalainen. We now have eight books published. We started with mainstream fiction, which is perhaps why you haven’t heard about my novels before. But we have been gradually introducing fantastical elements to the stories. For example, one book is set in Iceland, and has Icelandic elves in it.

Cheryl: Have you had any luck selling the books outside of Finland?

Anne: We’ve been with the same publisher all of the time, and they have been trying from the start to sell our books elsewhere in Europe, but until recently they haven’t had much money to invest in foreign rights sales. Now they have money and things are going much better.

Cheryl: Also you have been a finalist for a very major award, which must help. Tell me a bit about the book.

ISF N.º 0 – Free Download

Dear ISF readers: you are now free to download our “baby” 😉

Thats right, we achieved our goal to publish the first number (number zero actually) in June. This means we had to work really hard in order to do so! But hey, we have done it! And I am proud to say it!

Now we will wait peacefully  for you to tell us what do you think of the magazine, what is great about it, what is not so great and what we really need to change! So, without further ado, download the Pdf. version (e-book version will be available in two weeks counting from today) and read it! Then get back here and leave your comments!

One thing is certain: International Speculative Fiction is here to stay!

whooooahh!

DOWNLOAD ISF MAGAZINE´

ISF_issue_june_2012

 

Roberto Mendes

Editor in Chief

30 June 2012

ISF Interviewer – Cristian Tamas

The ISF Team continues to grow in quantity and quality! Cristian Tamas, from Romania, is the official interviewer for the ISF site and magazine. You can expect great interviews to international authors, as well as to scholars, literary critics, editors, promoters and fans.

Cristian Tamaș is a romanian essayist, translator and SF fan active within the speculative fiction domain since the 80s.

He was founding member of the Romanian Science Fiction&Fantasy Society (SRSFF = Societatea Română de Science Fiction& Fantasy, www.srsff.ro/)  in January 2009, and coordinated the ProspectArt, the SRSFF’s SF club relaunched in April 2009 in Bucharest (Romania),  and the yearly Ion Hobana Colloquium.  He is a member of the Ion Hobana and a SRSFF’s jury Awards.

He is also Editor of  „Bella Proxima”, a trilingual croatian SF anthology, together with Antuza Genescu and Aleksandar Žiljak (Eagle Publshing House, Bucharest, 2012).

He had interviewed David Brin, Prof. Rachel Haywood Ferreira (Division Head of the International Fantastic division of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, Iowa State University, USA ; research focus is Latin American science fiction), Prof.Arielle Saiber (Bowdoin College, USA; research focus : italian science fiction), Mariano Martín Rodríguez (SF scholar, Spain), Alexandre Babeanu (Solaris awarded canadian SF author), Ugo Bellagamba (french SF author awarded with Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire & Prix Rosny ), and Judit Lörinczy , an interview that will be published in the first number of ISF magazine (hungarian SF author).

In his words, he joined ISF because:

“International Speculative Fiction is an important project for all involved parties within the non-anglophone SFF field, I wish it will have a lot of success, fully deserved due to it’s amplitude, generosity and originality.”

Thank you very much Cristian, and welcome to the team!

ISF Interviews Fábio Fernandes and Djibril Al Ayad

Dear ISF readers, it is with great pleasure that we present to you today an interview with Fábio Fernandes and Djibril Al Ayad, editors of the upcoming antology “We See a Different Frontier”, a project successfuly funded at the Peerbackers site.

Want to find out all about the anthology? And also about the new non-fiction editor of ISF, Fábio Fernandes? So go ahead  and read the questions and answers below;)

ISF Interview

Roberto Mendes: “We See a Different Frontier” is an anthology of colonialism-themed speculative fiction from outside the first-world viewpoint. What’s the reason behind the idea? Or better yet, What are you and Djibril aiming for?

Fábio: It all began when The Future Fire magazine issued a call for guest editors last year. They were looking for people who could push the envelope a bit, offering new themes and challenges, always relating to the social and political views of TFF, which publishes, in their own words, “Social-political and Progressive Speculative Fiction. Feminist SF. Queer SF. Eco SF. Multicultural SF. Cyberpunk. An experiment in and celebration of new writing.” Even though I’m becoming to be known more as a steampunk writer now (according to The Steampunk Bible and Steampunk Reloaded, in which I was respectively interviewed and had a piece of my fiction published), I began writing cyberpunk fiction. In my heart of hearts, though, I never had an absolute favorite subgenre in SF, but I love writing science fiction stories with a strong social and political uptake, and with plenty of multicultural settings and gay and lesbian characters. These things always came naturally to me, so I thought of submitting to them a theme based on colonialism. TFF’s editor, Djibril al-Ayad, liked the idea and we quickly started to work together in the project that soon came to be named WE SEE A DIFFERENT FRONTIER, in a tribute to a Bruce Sterling story I love, “We See Things Differently”, where he shows the clash of cultures and – in that context – the utter impossibility of understanding between each other. What I’m aiming for is the exact opposite – is the possibility of an understanding between all of us, regardless of where in the world you live and what your ethnicity/gender/sexual orientation/religion happens to be. An understanding via a rich mosaic of stories from all over the world to show that, even though, alas, there are still geopolitical frontiers very hard to cross, the real frontiers always were in our minds, and we can cross over them at will. Djibril: All I’d add to this is that what I really want to publish is an anthology that I’d like to read: stories from all backgrounds, with varied topics and voices and perspectives. I want to see variety, and read work by authors I wouldn’t have come across otherwise. If I saw this anthology on the shelf of a bookstore, I think I’d be very excited to read it.

10 Questions to Cristian Mihail Teodorescu (Romania)

The ISF is proud to present an interview to Cristian Mihail Teodorescu, one of the great Romanian authors. This interview was kindly delivered to ISF by Cristian Tamas and it is a translation (by Cristian Tamas as well) of an interview made by Judit Lörinczy (Hungary) for the Romanian week on SFmag.hu. It is here published in English in its full extend for the first time. Some selected parts were published in English in SFmag.hu and the entire interview was published in Romanian on www.srsff.ro/ .

Many thanks to Judit Lörinczy for the great work promoting International authors on SFmag.hu.

The Editor in Chief:

Roberto Mendes

Cristian Mihail Teodorescu (Romania) : Interview for The romanian SF week (march 2012) – Judit Lörinczy (Hungary, SFmag.hu)

English

1. Why do you write science fiction and/or fantasy ?

It is maybe because this was always my favourite kind of litterature. Being at the same time a scientist, I feel intelectually well represented by this kind of knowledge, no matter if this implies an active role (i.e. a producer) or a passive (consumer) role.

2. When did you start writing, please, tell me a few words about your personal background, about your inspirations.

I start writing at the beginning of 1980s, when during my high school years. I already told you that my personal background is a scientific one, I owned a PhD degree in Chemical Physics and I was fascinated since I was about 10 years old by modern physics, i.e. relativity theory and quantum mechanics, especially by the fact that ‘normal’ people’s understanding was beyond these notions.

3. What did you publish until now, novel(s), short stories? What do you work on now ?

Until now I published two short stories collections. I wrote four novels until now, but did not consider yet that any of them is really ready to be published. I am working now on the improvement of the last one, who is some original continuation of Lem’s Cyberiad.

4. What are your favorite subjects, what do you like to write about? (If it possible, it would be good the hear about the main themes, the ideas of some published works, maybe a short plot of a novel also would be good. I think SF-F is the literature of ideas, and in Hungary we hardly would be able to get to know our Romanian colleague’s works, but we are interested in ideas… so what kind of ideas occupy nowadays the Romanian SF-F writers?)

It is impossible to give here a short answer to a such sophisticated inquiry, whereas a long answer is time consuming for me and for the readers as well, without bringing anything else than a wan idea of what it should really represent. I already mentioned continuating some masterworks in somehow an original way, by integrating modern litterary ressources (including textualism) and modern scientific conceptions (i.e. dark matter, parallel universes, modern puzzling theories of gravity etc.). Working on such a subject is quite fascinating. In my opinion, there are quite a few masterworks which might be ‘reloaded’ by integrating new ideas and significations in the existing framework.

5. What do you think, is the moral message important in a fantasy/science fiction story, or it’s only/main goal is to entertain the readers ?

I would replace ‘moral’ by ‘philosophical’ or ‘humanistic’ before answering ‘yes, it is important’. Entertainement is just the base rhythm, keeping readers connected to the story, but the finality – if any – is completely different.

Continue reading…