As part of our Hither Green Festival event, Women & SF/F, Katy Darby reads from Quarantine which is in our forthcoming anthology Five by Five (July).
After this the video conked out, so you missed out on We/She by J. A. Hopper and The Real McCoy by Cherry Potts, both coming up in the anthology We/She (August).
Apparently we both know if what we are writing is SciFi, but Fantasy is trickier to pin down.
Find out how you know that what your writing is fantasy… chasing ideas down rabbit holes with Cherry Potts & Katy Darby
More from our Women & SciFi/Fantasy evening for Hither Green Festival.
The audience put in their comments and recommendations. Call out for Naomi Novik and the Temeraire series
Cherry Potts & Katy Darby Arachne Press authors and editors, talk about growing up reading SF & Fantasy, particularly by women, at Manor House Library for Hither Green Festival
For the completists amongst you, here is the list Cherry forgot to bring with her of lots of Sf/Fantasy books she loves, feel free to comment to add your own high points. There are loads more these were the ones that sprang readily to mind!
Growing up with SF/F – YA books and first reads…
Diana Wynne Jones The Spell Coat series
Susan Cooper The Dark is Rising
Sylvia Engdahl Heritage of a star
Jan Mark: Useful Idiots/ Riding Tycho/ The Ennead
Andre Norton Forerunner Foray, Plague Ship, Moon of Three Rings, The Beastmaster, Mark of the Cat, Witchworld series, Octagon Magic, Steel Magic etc
Tanith Lee The Dragon Hoard, Kill the Dead, Companions on the Road, Drinking Sapphire Wine
Ursula le Guin Earthsea series, Lathe of Heaven, Rocannon’s World, Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed (actually pretty much anything by Ursula)
Helen Simpson Ingo series
Joy Chant Red Moon, Black Mountain
Pamela Sargeant Women of Wonder anthologies
Writers discovered in the 70s and 80’s
Margaret Atwood Handmaid’s Tale
Joanna Russ We Who are About to
Jaygee Carr Leviathan’s Deep, Navigator Syndrome
Joan D Vinge Snow Queen, Catspaw,
Jane Yolen Cards of Grief, Briar Rose, short stories,
Vonda McIntyre Fireflood and other stories, Dreamsnake
Elizabeth A Lynn The Woman who Loved the Moon
C J Cherryh Faded Sun, Brothers of Earth, Heavy Time, the Morgaine series
Marian Zimmer Bradley Sword & Sorceress anthologies
Anne McCaffery The ship who sang, Pern series, Decision at Doona
Megan Lindholm Wolf Brother, Harpy’s Flight
Suzy McKee Charnas Walk to the Ends of the World, Motherlines
Nicola Griffith Bending the Landscape (as editor), Hild, Ammonite, Slow RIver
R A MacAvoy Tea with the Black Dragon
Kate Wilhelm The Infinity Box, Where late the sweet birds sing,
Classics:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman Herland, The Yellow Wallpaper
James Tiptree, Jr Houston, Houston do you read? (short story) Her Smoke Went Up for Ever
Naomi Mitchison Memoirs of a Space Woman
Vera Chapman Three Damosels
Zenna Henderson The Anything Box
More recent:
Naomi Novik Temeraire series
Emily St John Mandel: Station Eleven
Aimee Bender The Colour Master (short stories)
Kate Atkinson Not the End of the World, Life After Life
Women writers of SF/Fantasy published by Arachne Press
Alex Smith Devilskein & Dearlove
Cherry Potts Mosaic of Air, The Dowry Blade
Ghillian Potts The Naming of Brook Storyteller series
Anthologies: (stories with SF/F flavour by women, there is SF/F by men, and stories with nothing to do with either SF or fantasy in most of them!)
Weird Lies (Alex Smith, Angela Trevithick, C T Kingston,Ellen O ‘Neill, Maria Kyle, Peng Shepherd, Rebecca J Payne) winner of Saboteur2014 best anthology award
Lovers’ Lies (Mi L Holliday, Michelle Shine)
We/She (J A Hopper, Joanne L M Williams, Jennifer Rickard, Elizabeth Hopkinson, Ilora Choudhury, Katy Darby)
Five by Five (Katy Darby, Helen Morris)
Solstice Shorts (Helen Morris, Imogen Robertson, Cindy George, Jayne Pickering)
Shortest Day, Longest Night (Polly Hall, Katy Darby,Pippa Gladhill, Karen Bovenmyer, Cherry Potts, Frances Gapper)
Dusk (Pippa Gladhill, Penny Pepper, Fiona Salter, Helen Slavin,Katy Lee)
Liberty Tales (Katy Darby, Cherry Potts, Sarah Evans)
Stations (Cherry Potts, Caroline Hardman)
May 18th at 7pm
Manor House Library
34 Old Road
SE13 5SY
as part of the Hither Green Festival
FREE
Meet Arachne Press authors Cherry Potts and Katy Darby for a chat about Science Fiction and Fantasy written by women, and their own writing.
The evening will include readings and an opportunity to buy books and ask questions (PLEASE ask questions!), and Katy and Cherry will talk about their favourite women SF/F writers and what got them started on writing speculative fiction. Cherry will also talk about her mother, Ghillian Potts’ young adult fantasy series The Naming of Brook Storyteller the final book of which, Wolftalker is published in early June. we have pre-publication copies, and will bring other books for you to buy. There may even be some giveaways.
Today’s story from Longest Night is Left of Earth, Right of Venus written by Pauline Walker, read by Patsy Prince, accompanied by Ian Kennedy & Sarah Lloyd.
Thursday 14th to Monday 18th August, the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention – LonCon 3 at ExCel London Docklands.
Arachne Press founder and author Cherry Potts is on two panels,
Liechester Square: Getting London Wrong
Thursday 14th August 19:00 – 20:00, Capital Suite 9 (ExCeL)
If there’s one thing you can guarantee about the reaction to any piece of SF set in London, it’s that British fans will delight in nit-picking the details: you can’t get there on the Piccadilly Line! So who are the worst offenders? Whose commodified Londons do we forgive for the sake of other virtues in their writing? Do we complain as much about cultural errors as geographic ones, and if not, why not? And given London’s status as a global city, is it even fair to claim ownership of its literary representation?
Alison Scott (Moderator), Leah-Nani Alconcel, Cherry Potts, Mike Shevdon, Russell Smith
We Can Rebuild You
Sunday 17th August 10:00 – 11:00, London Suite 2 (ExCeL)
SF medicine regularly comes up with “cures” for disabled bodies — from Geordi LaForge’s visor to the transfer of Jake Sully’s consciousness in Avatar — but the implications of such interventions are not always thought through as fully as we might hope. How does a rhetoric of medical breakthroughs and scientific progress shape these stories, and shape SF’s representation of lived physical difference? In what ways can SF narratives address dis/ability without either minimising or exaggerating such difference?
Cherry Potts (Moderator), Neil Clarke, Tore Høie, Helen McCarthy, Marieke Nijkamp
Here’s the video snippets for our May event, our first at new venue The Cafe of Good Hope.
The Technician’s Tales – Science Fiction, of all kinds and flavours.
Cliff Chapman – Extract-Terrestrials
Dan Carpenter – Old Sheets for Dirty Jobs (from new Boo Books anthology After the Fall)
Catherine Sharpe – Another Lesbian Space Fantasy (read by Carrie Cohen)
Cherry Potts – The Dark is My Delight
And finally
Liam Hogan – Candle
Wednesday May 21st 7pm, at our new venue The Cafe of Good Hope, 216 Hither Green Lane SE13 6RT join us for
The Technician’s Tales – stories with a Sci Fi leaning.
Featuring:
Liam Hogan, Cliff Chapman, Daniel Carpenter, Cherry Potts and Catherine Sharpe (Catherine’s story will be read by Carrie Cohen)
with tales of extraterrestrials, space walks, opinionated machinery, and all sorts of strange, otherworldly things.
£3 on the door or 
for advance booking.
Drinks snacks and books available.
We thought we’d try something new and see if we can fund our next Liars’ League Anthology Weird Lies through crowd funding.
Final cover design for Weird Lies copyright Kevin Threlfall
If you’ve not heard of this before, it’s where lots of people band together to support a project with small(ish) amounts of money, in return for rewards, which in our case range from a thank you and one of our gorgeous badges, via (signed) copies of books (Cherry Potts, Katy Darby, Alex Smith), an exploding tea flower (also Alex, and no, I don’t know what it is either), a cake recipe that features in a story (Peng Shepherd), actual cake (Katy) and story critiques (Cherry & Katy), right through to a signed DVD of Joshan Esfandiari Martin‘s short film Test Driving, a personalised, handwritten Mrs Darcy vs the Aliens story from Jonathan Pinnock, original artwork from Richard Smyth and a guided tour of the City of London from David Mildon.
Our authors are pretty special and I would like to thank every one of those who offered a contribution again, publicly. You are WONDERFUL.
We have 30 days to raise the money, and if we don’t raise it all we don’t get ANY. So if you know anyone who might help us fund this project, PLEASE pass it on to them!
Weird Lies is a distillation of the weirdest ideas Liars’ League authors have come up with. I suppose the current term is ‘speculative’ although I don’t much like that – what fiction isn’t? When I was working out what order to set the stories out in the book, I was labelling, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Myth, Down Right Peculiar, trying to make sure I didn’t clump genres together: DRP came up quite a bit!
You can see our crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter here