Another year older and deeper in mud

It's going to be a hard year to top.

Desire, Kisses and Blurbs

I was pleased and surprised yesterday to find the eighth anniversary issue of Aoife's Kiss (issue #29, for the record) had arrived in the mail. Pleased because it includes my story "The Ninth Part of Desire." (This now means that every one of my Asimov's stories has been reprinted or translated somewhere, which is kind of interesting -- you'd think it would be the stories that appeared in the little bitty anthologies that got reprinted, since fewer people would have seen them, but no. Of course, it may be that the ones Asimov's bought are better stories.) Surprised because... well, remind me to tell you that story someday.


Meanwhile, Rich Horton has been kind enough to provide a cover blurb for Fall From Earth. There wasn't enough time to get him a review copy before the cover went to print so he contributed an astonishingly generous and flattering overview of my work, which I'm far too weak to resist reprinting here:

"Matthew Johnson's short stories in the past few years have revealed as fresh and original a new voice as any in our field, and a voice with impressive range, as he's produced first-rate alternate history/fantasy, Borgesian intellectual speculation, and near-future SF. I'm enthusiastically looking forward to a novel."

Here it is: the cover design for Fall From Earth

Reviewers wanted

The galleys are almost done and we're looking for people to read and review Fall From Earth. Since we're hoping to score some nice juicy blurbs we're currently only looking for people in the SF field or professional reviewers (in other words, there should be some chance readers will have heard of you or your publication/website.)* If you're interested, e-mail me at Matthewj42@hotmail.com.




*There will probably be a promotion a little later for regular readers aimed at garnering Amazon reviews. Stay tuned.

Also

I forgot to mention, in my last post, that John Rogers wrote what I believe is the first (and so far only) parody of my work, in his review of "The Coldest War." You can see it here (scroll about halfway down the page.) It's meant kindly... I think.

A "Lagos" movie? Well, sort of... Plus, an unexpected form of time travel, and a twit Tweets

When I first read about the Mexican science fiction film Sleep Dealer last Fall I thought, "That sounds a lot like 'Lagos'" -- an apparently I'm not the only one: John E. Rogers Jr., reviewing that film for (naturally) Asimov's, opens his review with a long paragraph describing my story (the word "superb" does pop up... just sayin'.) I haven't seen the film yet (though I suspect my video store will get it when it comes out on DVD, they carry an impressive number of foreign films) but it's neat to see the same ideas coming up somewhere else.

In other news... I'm currently deep in revisions of Fall to Earth. Cutting the word count is proving to be easier than I thought it would be, but what's weird is working with the sections that have survived from the very first draft, more than ten years ago; it's a bit like having a cross-time conversation with my past overwriting self.

Finally: by order of my boss, I'm now on Twitter. You can follow me by clicking on the button to your right. So far I have two followers at any given time; one of them is admirably loyal, but the #2 spot has been filled by three different people. (I refuse to be one of those "please follow me" people, though I have sent replies to people whom I follow, which seems to be okay. Still figuring out the etiquette of this Twitter thing.)

It's cold in Denmark, it's cold in Russia

Somewhat to my surprise, "The Coldest War" is now my most-translated story: it will appear in an upcoming issue of Esli, the Russian magazine that previously translated "Another Country." Maybe I should pitch it to next year's Tesseracts so it can complete its circumpolar journey...

Matthew