“The Smell of Orange Groves” by Lavie Tidhar will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2012 edited by Rich Horton. T.J. McIntyre interviews him on the story.

I noticed connections in this story to other stories of yours as far as the setting goes, like Cloud Permutations, for example. For those who would like to read more of your stories in this setting, where should they look. Do you have any other upcoming works set in this same world you would like to mention?

Most of my science fiction stories take place in a sort of shared universe / future history, including, as you mentioned, my novella Cloud Permutations and my forthcoming novel from PS Publishing, Martian Sands.

“The Smell of Orange Groves”, however, takes place within a cycle of short stories all set in the Central Station area of Tel Aviv, somewhere in the future. A couple of others have also been published, and I hope, once I’m done with them, to publish them together as a mosaic novel.

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“After-Words” by Glen Hirshberg will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012 edited by Paula Guran. Jennifer Konieczny interviews him on the story.

Aaron says neither Ariel or his father could “understand about why saving books from extinction might be worth fighting for.” How do you feel about publishing moving towards e-books and away from traditional books? Do you use an e-reader?

I do use e-readers, and to my surprise, I love them. But I love them primarily because they give me opportunities to read even more, and to access difficult-to-find material. I think it remains to be seen whether the move to e-books will wind up good for writers, for readers, etc. I love books, and will always have them in my home and life, but I don’t feel it my duty or mission to proselytize for them. I’d rather proselytize for great writing. There’s an opportunity here to loosen the stranglehold that a staid, snarky, smug few have exerted over what constitutes good writing and who will have access to it for too long. I don’t have any particular faith that will happen. But we can all dream…

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“Walls of Paper, Soft as Skin” by Adam Callaway will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012 edited by Paula Guran. Stacey Friedberg interviews him on the story.

Everything here hints at something larger – the unspoken relationship between Tomai and the girl, the giant termite that consumes the world’s wood supply, even Kork’s special pole. How much of this world exists in your head beyond this story, and how did you come up with it all?

Lacuna is a strange beast. I fancy myself a bit of a worldbuilder. It takes me a solid week to plan out a new world, meticulously sketing out fauna, religion, planetary physics, and what have you. With Lacuna, I come up with a character and explore the city through their eyes. In essence, I know nothing more about the city than the readers do.

Lacuna is also a reactionary city. A few years ago, I read Walter Moers’s The City of Dreaming Books, and China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station. They were two of the most wildly imaginative works of fiction I had ever read. I wanted to create my own Bookholm (the main setting in Moers’s novel), but with the trashheap chic feel of New Crobuzon. The early Lacuna stories were all obsessed with writing and writers, but as I wrote, I thought about what goes into all these books we love. Papermaking on a large scale is a brutal, dangerous process, and when you combine that with the dirty underworld that is lampblack creation, I had the grimy, industrial setting I needed to tell my stories.

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“After the Apocalypse” by Maureen McHugh will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012 edited by Paula Guran. Erin Stocks interviews McHugh on the story. 

It’s potentially easy to write off Jane’s behavior, especially around men, as a coping mechanism given the circumstances, but her decision at the end is a strong one. Why does she decide to abandon the one responsibility she still has?

I don’t know that I can explain Jane’s behavior. I would hope that reading the story, people find her behavior believable and human. It’s quite gratifying to me how many people have been horrified by the story because morally I find her action unforgivable. That said, I don’t find it unthinkable. I have a lot of sympathy for Jane and find a lot of myself in her. I expect people to cope, damn it, and I don’t forgive easily when I think they aren’t. At the same time, who hasn’t dreamed of escaping the burdens of responsibility? I’ve never actually done any of the things that Jane has. I never sold furniture, I was never a runaway on the street, I’ve never even had a daughter. I’ve behaved a lot better than Jane. But I suspect Jane would survive a disaster a lot better than I would. I’m pretty sure she’s a lot tougher than I am.

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“Mysteries of the Old Quarter” by Paul Park will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012 edited by Paula Guran. Jennifer Konieczny interviews Park on the story. 

To borrow Dr. Delorme’s question, do you think “it possible that we are haunted in dreams by our beloved dead, not just in metaphor but in actual fact?”

I do think it’s possible. I think it would be foolish to be sure, one way or the other. I’m of an age now when I’ve lost some people who were precious to me, and when they appear suddenly in memory, or else unbidden in the mind’s eye, as clearly as if they had walked into a room where I was sitting, I must wonder if I am the only one who is responsible. How strange it is that we can see people so clearly, and not just in dreams, and not because there is some reason we have summoned them, or some chain of cause and effect that leads back to them. But in the midst of some other activity we can turn around and see them, and feel their presence, as if they’d put their hand upon our arm.

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“The Fox Maiden” by Priya Sharma will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012 edited by Paula Guran. Gina Guadagnino interviews Sharma on the story.

Fox hunting is a vexed subject for many people, given the history of the sport and the allegations of cruelty that led to its being banned in many countries. What kind of research did you do on fox hunting for this piece?

I once visited a stately home with a hunting room, which horrible and fascinating. It was a window into a world that’s utterly foreign to me. There was a photo of a young girl who’d been bloodied (it was her first hunt and her face had been daubed with fox blood).

I did some reading on fox hunting but I did more reading on foxes. I think they’re gorgeous. I can assure you that no foxes were harmed during the writing of this story.

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“Lord Dunsany’s Teapot” by Naomi Novik will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012 edited by Paula Guran. Erin Stocks interviews Novik on the story.

“He held it between his hands while the heat but not the scent faded, and sipped peace as long as it lasted.” Peace in a teapot is a lovely notion. Will you tell us a little about how you came up with the origins of “Lord Dunsany’s Teapot?”

This story was part of the wonderful anthology The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, where the challenge was to envision a mysterious artifact that might have been auctioned off after having been found in the estate of a very strange collector, and tell its story.

Trying to think of the appropriate dates, when such an artifact might have come into the collector’s hands, I had the vague sense that the death of Lord Dunsany (a wonderful pre-Tolkien author of fantasy) might have worked, and from there the idea quickly took form of a teapot that might have come into his hands, and the First World War the center of the experience.

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“The Summer People” by Kelly Link will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2012 edited by Rich Horton. Erin Stocks interviews Link on the story. 

Fran’s reaction to the unusual and unworldly elements of her life–taking them all in stride and not even blinking an eye–provides a nice contrast to Ophelia’s (and possibly the reader’s) reactions. How did you go about writing the juxtaposition between the two girls? 

Well, as the writer, you have to imagine how your characters look at the world. You take things in (or don’t) depending on whether or not you’ve grown up in a environment where there are particular kinds of danger or risk or responsibility. Ophelia comes from a rich family, she’s gay, and she’s been bullied. So she would be sensitive to particular kinds of situations and risk and blind to others. She’s susceptible to overtures of friendship, because she’s lonely. She is attracted to the idea of magic and the fantastic, maybe because she’s been protected from the true cost of things. (I think that often magic seems like a kind of currency–you get marvelous  things! Magic can belong to you!) Fran, on the other hand, is self-reliant. She knows what things like magic and family cost. In her eyes, friendship isn’t something affordable.

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The spirits of the dead have walked among our legends, myths, and stories since before recorded history. Ghostly visitations, hauntings, unquiet souls seeking the living, vengeful wraiths, the possibility of life beyond the grave that can somehow reach out and touch us…these are some of literature’s most enduring icons. Now, in the twenty-first century, we are no less fascinated with phantoms than our cave-dwelling ancestors or our Victorian-age forebears. Thirty modern masters of fright and fantasy fill this anthology with shivers, chills, and spooky explorations of both sides of the veil. Be prepared to keep a light on all night!

Peter Atkins: “Between the Cold Moon and the Earth”
Rick Bowes: “There’s a Hole in the City”
Laird Barron: “The Lagerstatte”
Steve Duffy: “The Rag-and-Bone Men”
Jeffrey Ford: “The Trentino Kid”
Karen Joy Fowler: “Booth’s Ghost”
Neil Gaiman: “October in the Chair”
Stephen Gallagher: “The Box”
Elizabeth Hand: “Wonderwall”
Glen Hirshberg: “The Muldoon”
Alaya Dawn Johnson: “The Score”
Stephen Graham Jones: “Uncle” (original)
Caitlin R. Kiernan: “Apokatastasis”
Marc Laidlaw: “Cell Call”
Margo Lanagan: “The Proving of Smollett Standforth”
John Langan: “The Third Always Beside You”
Joe R. Lansdale: “The Case of the Lighthouse Shambler”
Maureen F. McHugh: “Ancestor Money”
Sarah Monette: “The Watcher in the Corners”
Reggie Oliver: “Mrs Midnight”
Richard Parks: “The Plum Blossom Lantern”
James van Pelt: “Savannah is Six”
Tim Powers: “A Soul in a Bottle”
Barbara Roden: “The Palace”
Ekaterina Sedia: “Tin Cans”
Nisi Shawl: “Cruel Sistah”
John Shirley: “Faces in Walls”
Peter Straub: “Mr Aikman’s Air Rifle”
Melanie Tem: “Dhost”
Steve Rasnic Tem: “The Ex”

“Some of them Closer” by Marissa Lingen will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2012 edited by Rich Horton. Jennifer Konieczny interviews Lingen on the story.

When Mireille retrieves the three boxes she saved before leaving, she reflects, “Once you do the math on what will keep for a hundred years, it’s a lot easier to give away the things you can’t take with you.” What would you store for a hundred years?

I have here on my desk a little cup that glows sparklies when you shine ultraviolet light into it, and I put my late grandfather’s jewelry into it and my late great-grandmother’s jewelry. That would definitely go in the box, and depending on which relatives had gone before me, there might be a few more family pieces in it by then. A lot of what I’m emotionally attached to is either really easy to preserve digitally and recopy–this person’s books, that person’s photos–or very difficult to store for a hundred years intact. I have in my house my great-grandmother’s piano. If I do the math, it’s nearing a hundred years in the family already, and I have no intention of getting rid of it any time soon, but if I was going to be gone for a hundred years, could I store it? I don’t know. I don’t know if we could preserve my great-grandfather’s Kipling, but I’d sure try.

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