The world gets closer to knowing ‘Climates Unknown’

In this forthcoming novel, Arturo Serrano delivers “a stunning portrayal of how things that seem infinitesimal can shake the entire world,” Dawn Vogel writes for History That Never Was.

From the book description:

“In this alternate history, the Mayflower was lost at sea, and the English Separatists were disheartened from further colonization of North America. The United States were never born. The centuries that follow will see the emergence of rival empires that will split up the world between them. One will become the terror of the seas. One will rampage with carriages of steam. One will take to the skies. And the people caught in the middle will fight against the colonial system to bring an end to all empires.”

To Climates Unknown is available for preorder. It will be released one week from today, on November 25, 2021, the 400th anniversary of the first mythical U.S. Thanksgiving.

Review of To Climates Unknown by @carturo222 Great alternate history touching on climate change and anti-colonialism! https://t.co/xBgaaPjoyh

— Dawn Vogel (she/her) (@historyneverwas) November 17, 2021

When art feels real: ‘discovery rather than invention’

“I’ve never felt I was making any of this up…I’ve never felt it was anything other than real: discovery rather than invention: exploration rather than creation.”

Lauren, the protagonist of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower
quoted by Madelyn Jablon, Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African American Literature (University of Iowa Press, 1997, p. 140)

What ‘Hypnogram’ expects my book covers to look like

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On Hypnogram.xyz, you type in a phrase and it will generate a corresponding image. (Sometimes. It tends not to like my phrases.) In these images, can you recognize a correspondence to my book titles: Painting Dragons, Bad Fire, Ten Past Noon, and Enkidu is Dead and Not Dead? This is how the algorithm would have designed my book covers. I’m glad I didn’t ask it to do so.

What if Descartes had died young?

Recently, I interviewed my husband, Arturo Serrano, about why he kills off René Descartes in his very shortly forthcoming alternate history novel, To Climates Unknown. The interview is on Prof. Bob Lane’s Episyllogism blog. Please check it out there!

To Climates Unknown is available for preorder. It will be released on November 25, 2021, the 400th anniversary of the first mythical U.S. Thanksgiving.

“In this alternate history, the Mayflower was lost at sea, and the English Separatists were disheartened from further colonization of North America. The United States were never born. The centuries that follow will see the emergence of rival empires that will split up the world between them. One will become the terror of the seas. One will rampage with carriages of steam. One will take to the skies. And the people caught in the middle will fight against the colonial system to bring an end to all empires.”

—From the book description

‘A writer just needed to keep scrolling’: ‘Runaways’ by Michael J. Seidlinger

“A writer, a little bit lonely and a whole lot desperate, signed into social media,” begins Michael J. Seidlinger’s new book, Runaways: A Writer’s Dilemma.

Isn’t that how the day often begins? Reading people’s online conversations about books. Thinking about joining the conversation. Drafting the post. Posting the post. Receiving a notification of one engagement. Checking the stats. That’s how the book will be written, correct?

“A writer just needed to keep scrolling.”

Runaways

A writer may, or may not, have this fraught relationship with social media. A writer may, or may not, occasionally drink one too many beers. Occasionally, a certain writer exists who has never opened a social media account nor a beer can. That is OK, because that writer, too, is also included and is grateful to be seen, if at an angle. That writer is also afflicted by nostalgia and best-laid plans and egg timers and fountain pens and friends to whom they owe phone calls.

The runaways are the itch and the scratching of the itch. The counting of the words. The tallying of the rejections. The reading of Runaways is a meta-runaway.

The reading of Runaways is a meta-runaway.

We read and write to feel seen and to get better at reading and writing. We do that, right? We read and write.

“Eventually, a writer abandoned the books and went back online.” — Michael J. Seidlinger

From Future Tense Books.