The Imago Machine #3: Launch Events, Pre-Orders, and a Guest Editing Gig

Jan 15, 2019

THE IMAGO MACHINE #3 - JANUARY 15, 2019

It is now just over two months before the release of A Memory Called Empire, which is both terrifying and intensely exciting. This object -- this object with a world in it, and some people I made up who I am extremely fond of, and half my postdoctoral research run through a blender with equal parts Dune, Foreigner, and Ancillary Justice -- will exist, physically, and you all will be able to touch it, and take it home with you, and accidentally drop it in bathtubs or get chocolate on it or allow your kittens to devour the corners with their little needle-teeth. I made something, and with the good grace and extensive brilliance of Tor's editors, layout & design team, and publicity people, what I have made is very nearly rendered extant. Reified. Made real.

This is pretty fucking neat, to put it lightly.

PRE-ORDERS

You can pre-order A Memory Called Empire right this moment: in e-book and in hardcover, and very soon in audio -- I just sent over the pronunciation guide to Macmillan Audio, and I'm very excited about the actor they've picked to read the book.

Pre-order here at your preferred retailer,
or talk to your local indie bookstore about getting copies in!

EVENTS & APPEARANCES

The next two months are a whirlwind of me finishing the manuscript of the second Teixcalaan book, A Desolation Called Peace, getting ready for the launch of A Memory Called Empire, starting my final semester of this urban planning master's degree, and applying for work in my new field. (Hey, if any of you need a climate & hazard mitigation planner with experience working in major metropolises, project management, research of all kinds, with a speculative-futures mentality and accompanying writing skills, hit me up!)

... and then, in March, things get exciting.

I'm doing a whole series of events surrounding the launch of the book. They're up on my website, which I am going to try to keep current, so you can always check at Appearances & Events to see where I'll be next and sspecifics on times and schedules. But since I've got March - May mostly sorted, and I'd love to see any and all of you, here's where I'm going to be:

MARCH 26 - BALTIMORE - The Ivy Bookshop - launch party & reading with Vivian Shaw
APRIL 3 - NEW YORK CITY - The Strand - in conversation with Peng Shepherd
APRIL 4 - WASHINGTON, D.C. - Solid State Books - "Political Protest in Speculative Fiction", a discussion with Malka Older
APRIL 13 - SAN FRANCISCO - Writers With Drinks - a reading & performance
APRIL 17 - NEW YORK CITY - KGB Bar - a reading at the Fantastic Fiction monthly series
APRIL 24 - BALTIMORE - Charm City Spec - a reading
MAY 11-12 - MINNEAPOLIS - Wordplay Festival - details to come!
MAY 18 - GAITHERSBURG - Gaithersburg Book Festival - details to come!

GUEST EDITING - RECKONING 4

Lastly, I have the utter delight of announcing that I’ll be the guest editor for Year 4 of Reckoning, a journal of creative writing on environmental justice. Submissions are open now, and will remain open until the autumn equinox (Monday September 23, 2019), unless the issue is filled prior to that date.

I’ve been reading Reckoning since Marissa Lingen introduced me to its founder, Michael J. DeLuca, around when the first issue came out. The journal has produced some of my favorite pieces of creative work engaging with the environment, climate change, and the anthropocene in the past couple of years, and I’m very honored that Michael is trusting me with the shape of Year 4.

Because it’s me — city-obsessive, systems-thinking me — I’ve created a themed call for this issue which is broadly construed as human relationships to the built environment. I’m looking for fiction and creative nonfiction, preferably between 1000 and 10,000 words (but feel free to submit longer and shorter as well). The full call for submissions is on Reckoning’s site, here: https://reckoning.press/submit/, and my specific guidelines are here: https://reckoning.press/reckoning-4-submission-call-fiction-nonfiction/ … and also repeated below.

For Reckoning 4, I am specifically seeking works which address the relationship of humans to the built environment: the city as organism; climate-changed urban spaces; architecture as environmental in/justice; the point of contact where human alteration and ecological alteration touch; fantasias of density and of absence; blurs between organic and inorganic forms, places, and persons. Etcetera.
I am primarily looking for fiction, but am also interested in creative nonfiction on the above theme. A speculative element is preferred, but not necessary, for fiction. I will also consider work that falls outside the theme if it is otherwise deeply compelling and fits Reckoning’s general guidelines.

I’m going to try to stick to a 30-day turnaround for initial responses. Fingers crossed. I’ve been a submissions editor before, but this is my first in-charge-of-driving-the-spaceship-around editorial gig.

Please do send me your work. I can’t wait to read it.

And, to see us out, for those of you who got this far ... how about a sneak preview of the opening of A Desolation Called Peace? #

“First, reality was suspended. All breaches to Inca protocol occurred at once: the rules governing personal contact (visual, oral, and corporal), drinking, and eating were broken. When Ciquinchara first met the conquerors he was allowed to do what no Indian could, and now the tables were turned. Since there was no signifying context to frame their interactions, the actors exposed themselves to limitless risk. Atahualpa could have been slaughtered, or Soto and Hernado poisoned…”

-- Gonzolo Lamana, in Beyond Exoticization and Likeness: Alterity and the Production of Sense in a Colonial Encounter

“Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.”

-- Tacitus (quoting Calgacus), Agricola 30

CHAPTER ONE

Nine Hibiscus watched the cartograph cycle through its last week of recorded developments for a third time, and then switched it off. Without its pinpoint stargleams and fleet-movement arcs inscribed in light, the strategy table on the bridge of Weight for the Wheel was a flat black expanse, dull-matte, as impatient as its captain for new information.

There was none forthcoming. Nine Hibiscus didn’t need to watch the cartograph again to remember how the displayed planet-points winked first distress-red and then out-of-communication black, vanishing like they were being swallowed by a tide. No matter how thickly laid the lines of incoming Teixcalaanli ships were shown on that cartograph, none of them had advanced into the flood of blank silence. Beyond this point, Nine Hibiscus thought, not without a shimmering anticipation, we are quite afraid to see.

Her own Weight for the Wheel was the second-closest vessel to the communicationless swath. She’d sent only one ship farther out than she’d take her own people. That was the hybrid scout-gunner called Knifepoint’s Ninth Blooming, a near-invisible shard of a ship that slipped free of her flagship’s open-mawed hangar and into the silent black. Sending it might have been Nine Hibiscus’s first mistake as Her Brilliance the Emperor Nineteen Adze’s newest yaotlek – commander of fleet commanders, with multiple Teixcalaanli legions at her command. An Emperor made new yaotleks when that Emperor wanted to make a war: the one begot the other. Nine Hibiscus had heard that old saying the first time when she’d been a cadet, and thought it herself approximately once a week, absent confirmation of absolute observed truth.

Nineteen Adze, new-crowned, had very badly wanted to make a war.