Melissa Scott Writes

Well, it finally happened. I got COVID. Mind you, I dodged it long enough that I was fully vaccinated and singly boosted, so it has been pretty much a bad bout of flu, albeit with extra fatigue, fever, and the worst sore throat I can remember. I never had any breathing problems, and tested negative after about 10 days, though I was going to bed around sunset for another three weeks or so.

Recently, the Washington Post profiled a Google engineer who believes that a Google-created AI, LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), has achieved sentience — that it has become a person, the equivalent of a “7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics.” Google denies that LaMDA is sentient, and mo

It’s time for the latest Pride Storybundle! Once again, Catherine Lundoff and I have pulled together a collection of outstanding LGBTQIA+ SF/F, with five books in the main bundle and ten in the bonus. You’ll find the usual mix of newer writers and new works, plus some older ones, as well as a mix of novels, novellas, and short story collections. There’s science fiction, fantasy, dark fantasy, solarpunk, cyberpunk, and more, ranging in tone from deeply serious to extremely funny, all written by authors who are at the top of their game.

Elise Matheson (aka Lioness) just had an interesting post on her Patreon about having to go back and rework a piece of jewelry because of an unexpected problem with some of the included beads. (By the way, if you don’t know either Elise’s jewelry or her Patreon, I recommend both highly!

It’s been far too long since I last posted, for which I apologize. Partly, it’s that 2021 was not a particularly good year personally. I lost family, friends, and cats, and have been dealing with the fallout ever since. In many ways, I’ve been very fortunate, in that I’ve been able to ride out the worst disruptions, but I am very tired of it. And just very tired.

This has been a busy and often difficult late summer/fall, beginning with an unexpected death in the family that required considerable attention and travel at the height of the latest COVID surge and again during the aftermath of Hurricane Ida. I’m still dealing with paperwork, and will be for the foreseeable future, but at least I shouldn’t have to travel for that for a while. I hope.

You may have heard that Lethe Press is slowing down its work, after 20 years of publishing LGBTQ+ fiction, particularly SFF. As a result, Amy Griswold and I have reclaimed the rights to the two Mathey & Lynes novels, Death By Silver and A Death at the Dionysus Club, and are looking to move them elsewhere. As a result, the ebooks are temporarily unavailable.

My novel Finders (currently part of the Starting Hurricanes Storybundle) began, as so many of my books do, with a late night conversation at a convention.

One of the pleasures of working with a smaller press is that editors and publishers have a bit more time and freedom to indulge in fannish pasttimes, like imagining the perfect cast should a book ever be made into a movie. It's with great delight that I share this fancast from Athena Andreadis - I'm particularly taken with Raz Degan for Esclin, and Salma Hayak is perfect for Alcis. Hiroyuki Sanada is a wonderful Kelleiden, though Athena also suggested Oded Fehr, who would also have been good.

The annual Pride Storybundle is in full swing — many thanks for Catherine Lundoff for taking over most of the curation this year, and to Jason Chen for letting us make this an annual event. When I started this five years ago, I was thinking of it as a one-off. I had co-edited Lethe Press’s annual lesbian SF/F anthology, Daughters of Russ, and been struck by the number of stories we had to consider — and I knew we had missed some.