All posts by bobalder

Strange Horizons reviews The Wan!

Check this out! I guess nobody noticed it before today. My novel The Wan was reviewed in Strange Horizons in april! Strange Horizons! Yay!


“And in The Wan, Bo Balder takes this idea and gives it two thoughtful twists. The first is that, after several generations of colonisation, this colony is dying. Human fertility plummets, and the implication is that it’s because the interaction between coloniser and colonised is fundamentally toxic. Humans can survive for a while, but their digestive system is simply not adapted to the vegetation that evolved on this new world. The plants and animals they originally brought with them from Earth are no longer sufficient, and the fundamental mismatch between organisms is slowly killing the planetary interlopers.

This is a great idea. It is supplemented by an ever better one, an idea that really piques that sci-fi staple, the sense of wonder.

It’s a very long and thoughtful review, and in spite of some criticism, I really appreciate it.

http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/the-wan-by-bo-balder/

Heiresses of Russ is published

Every year Lethe Press does a roundup of the Best Lesbian Fiction of the year, called Heiresses of Russ. This year my F&SF story ‘A House of her Own’ is in it, in an awesome TOC full of famous writers, edited by Alyx Dellamonica.

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Here’s the line-up:

Grandmother ley-neylit’s Cloth of Winds by Rose Lemberg
The Occidental Bride by Benjanun Sriduangkaew
The Devil Comes to the Midnight Café by A.C. Wise
And We Were Left Darkling by Sarah Pinsker
A House of Her Own by Bo Balder
Love in the Time of Markov Processes by Megan Arkenberg
Where Monsters Dance by Merc Rustad
Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers by Alyssa Wong
Fabulous Beasts by Priya Sharma
The Wollart Nymphs by Melissa Scott
The New Mother by Eugene Fischer
Eldritch Brown Houses by Claire Humphrey
The Tip of the Tongue by Felicia Davin
Where Can a Broken Glass Mend? by Sonya Taaffe
A Residence for Friendless Ladies by Alice Sola Kim
The Deepwater Bride by Tamsyn Muir
Doubt the Sun by Faith Mudge

The Wan is published!

Finally my sf book The Wan is published.
Cover picture
Quote from Jeff Vandermeer, author of the Southern Reach trilogy:”Inventive and energetic, with a truly unique SF premise. A promising debut from one of my favorite publishers.”

Quote from Ferret Steinmetz, author of Flex: “A near-perfect blending of fantasy and sf, The Wan takes a crazy biological idea and pushes it to its limit.”

Quote from Sylvia Volk, author of City and Dragon: “”Bo Balder’s The Wan is bizarre and gritty sf, funny when you least expect it, with no-holds-barred weirdness at every turn of the plot. The heroine Frog will win hearts. She’s the lowest of the low – abused, attacked, abandoned – but she never gives up, and her journey from slavery to empowerment takes place against the backdrop of nothing less than an apocalypse …”