"Slow Stampede" mixed reviews

The March issue of Asimov's is out and "Slow Stampede" has gotten mixed reviews.

Lois Tilton gives me her first RECOMMENDED for this story.

Raj is a bandit, young, ruthless and ambitious to be the next Chief. His village makes its living by raiding the caravans of Swamp Elephants that travel through the Swamp where they live.

From the distance, they looked like Jesus-bugs skimming the mud, but Raj knew that they stood taller than the sequoias that anchored their roots hundreds of yards under the surface. The swampiphant's legs pierced the upper layers of silt, finding purchase further down as the mud served to stabilize their tremendous height.
But the hungry Merfolk also live in the Swamp, and must be reckoned with.

Colorful and imaginative worldbuilding makes this one entertaining.

RECOMMENDED

Garbled Signals has a less than enthusiastic review:

“Slow Stampede”, by Sara Genge, presents a finely-imagined world of bandits raiding caravans of immense “swamp elephants” on a low-gravity planet. The main character is well developed and very realistic, as a young bandit chafing at the authority of his tribe; but maybe he’s too self-confident and amoral to win our sympathy. He is also the only character to really be developed (perhaps reflecting his own self-centered point of view). The story ends with his marrying a character who has not been developed beyond a brief sketch. This, and other loose ends, makes the story feel incomplete. On the other hand, if this is an excerpt from a novel, there is plenty to build on here.

That one goes to show how hard it is sometimes to make unlikable protags work.

Another one:

"Slow Stampede" by Sara Genge is set in a world with swampiphants and Merpeople. Raj wants to be the Chief of his village and plots ways to do it. How things work out for him make for a nicely-told little story--

SFRevu

Overall, I'm pretty happy with what people have been saying about the story. I've finished the copyedits of "Shoes-to-Run" so that one should appear in Asimov's in a few months.

*Edited to add this revue by Colin Harvey, Suite101

Separating them is Sara Genge's 'Slow Stampede.' On an alien planet, Raj and his tribe eke out a marginal existence in a vast swamp also inhabited by cannibal merpeople, through which pass regular caravans of swamp-elephants ripe for the picking. Newcomer Genge skillfully depicts an exotic world peopled by ambitious youngsters, doddering elders and indulgent mothers. Recommended.

Benjamin Crowell's 'Whatness" also gets a recommended and Holly Phillip's 'The Long, Cold Goodbye' gets a highly recommended. Reading all these reviews of the other stories in this issue makes me look wistfully at the mail and wonder when I'll get my copies.

Overall, the issue seems to be sitting well with reviewers.

'Cause Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin weren't enough

...now I get compared to Tiptree!

I quote:

Sara Genge writes a complex story of alien sex with her "Prayers for an Egg." Like Tiptree whose work this was reminiscent of, Genge is an outsider, Tiptree coming from Langley and the mainstream, Genge from Spain; her rhythm and cadences equally exotic to American genre SF.

These stories mark the highpoint of this issue, their 'difference' from the norm giving the issue a rare depth.

And because I have a twisted feminist mind, I'll note that all three writers I've so far been compared to are women. Not that I mind, not with those three. Just sayin'

I think "exotic" needs to become part of my name, somehow. Sara Genge, aka "Exotic". Sooo cool.

Sale and proation

Asimov's wants "Prayers for an Egg". This story was work-shopped in Villa Diodati, where the magnificent writers there said something along the lines of "more alien, less patchwork". The aliened-up version seemed to be to Asimov's liking.

The world needed a story about tentacles, tri-gendered aliens and their ambivalent relationship towards their own eggs. I've only written two stories with tentacles in them, but both have been accepted by pro mags. I think I'm onto something here. What's with editors and tentacles, anyway? Because yeah, I find them cool, but then I wouldn't put them in my stories otherwise. It just seems peculiar that, for once, the universe and I are on the same tree. I'm tempted to graft tentacles onto my trunk stories, see if they get sapped up... That's a fun writing exercise if I ever heard of one.

This is my third pro sale, so I guess I'm on proation, that ample space-time continuum wherein writers reside who have sold three or more stories to pro markets but who haven't yet achieved the level of excellence and consistency of say, Nancy Fulda, Jay Lake, Ruth Nestvold etc. For me the consistency thing is a big issue, I can sort of get things sort of right like 10% of the time but 90% of my writing is wasted on unfixable drafts. If anyone has suggestions to help with this, I'm all ears.

Now, should I join SFWA or not? The fact that I can doesn't mean I have to, but there might be cool stuff in that organization that I'm missing. So far, I've only seen the icky stuff.

Sorry if this blog post doesn't make any sense: I'm kind of giddy. I may have to go eat some chocolate.

Edited to add: Thanks to Marshall Payne who helped me with an early version of this story. I don't know how I forgot to mention him by name. This story has gone through a lot of fazes and there's probably other people who have critiqued it and who I've forgotten to mention in this post. Among them are several Hatrackers and several Liberty Hallers. Thanks to all of them. I doubt there has been a story that's been more critiqued and edited than this one has.