Celebrating Seven Years: Best of The Machine Stops

Saying goodbye to the old Machine Stops logo

August 8, 2016 was the seven-year anniversary for this blog, and I finally got around to giving the site a facelift. Hopefully, the new layout will make reading easier on they eyes. I'm also going through and updating broken links, including making sure all the book titles and images now have active links.

The Machine Stops started out with me intermittently rambling on about what I was working on in the infancy of my writing career, but as I became more involved in the SF/F community as a professional (sometime around 2011), the blog become infinitely more interesting, featuring interviews with other authors and the occasional SF/F lists.

Looking forward, I'll still be blogging about my own writing updates (about once a month), but you can expect to see a lot more interviews with other authors and fun features like top-10 lists and whatever other strange ideas pop into my head.

To celebrate the first seven years and kickoff a new chapter for The Machine Stops, here are the

Top 10 Most Popular SF/F Posts

Misty Massey and the Weird West Anthology

I'm very pleased to welcome a guest post from Misty Massey. You might recall, I interviewed Massey a few years ago to talk about her pirate fantasy novel, Mad Kestrel. She's stopped by today to talk about her newest project—this time in the role of editor.

-GC

Hey y'all! I'm delighted to be Garrett's guest today! My name is Misty Massey, and until last summer, I was a mere writer of fantastic fiction and author of Mad Kestrel (pirates and magic and adventure...oh my!). I say 'until last summer' because that was when things became slightly more crazy and exciting in my world and I agreed to be an editor. I was a guest at Congregate, and I had just finished a rousing session of Live Action Slush. I was in the hallway chatting with my co-conspirators Emily Leverett and Margaret McGraw when the subject of publishing an anthology of weird western stories came up. We all thought it sounded like great fun, so we started approaching authors we believed would add to the thrill of such a project. Nearly all of them said "Yes!" (okay, a couple were squealing with excitement, but I'm not going to try to spell that sound for you!), so we started querying publishers. Danielle Ackley-McPhail of eSpec Books snapped us up, and before we knew it, we were running a Kickstarter to fund the project.

What is weird west? It's fantasy or science fiction set in the world (or the aesthetic) of the American western frontier. Movies like

20 Obscure SF/F/H Books Recommended by the Pros

Understanding why some SF/F/H novels become massively popular while others languish in obscurity is an exercise in futility. For whatever reason, some books simply never get the right combo of marketing support, reader buzz, and magical-mass-market-mojo to become popular. Other books have moments of critical and popular success only to fade into obscurity over time. It’s no surprise then that there are dozens—if not hundreds or thousands—of SF/F/H gems that are largely unheard of and unread by modern readers. In an effort to unearth some of these gems I invited fourteen authors to recommend their favorite obscure spec-fic novels. Along with my own recommendation, we’ve dug up over twenty novels for readers to go out and discover. Enjoy!

-G. Calcaterra


“The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forster
-Recommended by Garrett Calcaterra, author of Dreamwielder

Brave New World, Ninteen Eighty-Four, and Yevgeny Zamyatin's We always get credit for being the grand-daddies of dystopian fiction, but E.M. Forster's novelette “The Machine Stops” predates all of them. First published in 1909, it is a stark warning tale of what could happen when humans become too reliant on technology. It seems more prescient than ever in today's era of dependency on smart phones, GPS navigation, and auto-correct. “The Machine Stops” is not entirely obscure, having been included in Volume 2B of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame anthology (1973), but few people know about it today. Dig up the Hall of Fame anthology, the Penguin collection of Forster's Selected Stories, or find the story free online, thanks to it being in the public domain.

Author Interview: Misty Massey

Misty Massey is no bandwagon pirate fanatic who got turned onto the trend on account of the Disney Pirates of the Caribbean movies or by watching too many Captain Morgan rum commercials. Nope, she’s been fascinated by pirates since she was a kid, and her first novel, Mad Kestrel, carries on the rich literary heritage of great pirate adventures. Misty and I became acquainted several years back on an online forum where she was hosting a Q&A session. She happened to mention that the Tim Powers novel On Stranger Tides was a big influence for her, and I quickly bragged that I work with Powers at the Orange County High School of the Arts, and was myself a big fan of his work. She was duly impressed, and when my book The Roads to Baldairn Motte (co-written with Craig Comer and Ahimsa Kerp) came out, I more or less begged her to give it a read and write a cover blurb. She obliged, and once again her generosity has come through by granting her time to come chat here on my blog.

What follows is the inside scoop on a potential sequel to Mad Kestrel, who it is that makes her gush like a school girl, and some secret skills she’s been honing that’ll keep randy buccaneers at bay on the dance floor. Yarr!

Garrett: First off, how is the sequel to Mad Kestrel coming along?

Misty: (laughs) That's the question of the hour, isn't it? You wouldn't believe how many people ask me that every day (which is lovely, and I'm not complaining at all.) It’s coming along. I'm in rewrites, and frankly I've discovered a few things that I somehow missed in the first draft, making it a deeper and hopefully more satisfying story. I had hoped to be finished mid-July, but now it looks like I've got another week or so of work. The end is in sight!

The Roads to Baldairn Motte

After many years of hard work, The Roads to Baldairn Motte is finally here! Collaborators Craig Comer, Ahimsa Kerp, and myself started working on the mosaic fantasy novel back in 2007. It took us about a year and a half to write, then we searched high a low to find a home for it (which we found in the awesome independent publisher, L&L Dreamspell), and then we had to forge through the revision process with our editors. All said and done, we have a book that all of us our proud of, and more importantly, a book readers are going to love. Here's what two of our reviewers had to say about the novel:

"I was drawn into the world of Baldairn Motte at once by the rich prose and the promise of high adventure, but it was the characters and the fast moving story that held me literary hostage. I hope there's a sequel!"

 - James P. Blaylock, Winner of the World Fantasy Award and Philip K. Dick Award

"Whores become heroes, farmers become freedom fighters and healers strike down the unjust against the backdrop of a land in turmoil. Fans of George R R Martin's Song of Ice and Fire or Paul Hoffman's The Left Hand of God will relish the excitement of The Roads to Baldairn Motte."

- Misty Massey, author of Mad Kestrel

I'd like thank Jim Blaylock and Misty Massey immensely for saying such kind words about the book. Now it's up to all you readers out there to see if Jim and Misty are full of shit or not. The book is available in paperback and Kindle formats. Grab a copy from Amazon here, and let me know what you think. And as always, thanks for your support!

-Garrett Calcaterra