The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell (Hogarth US & UK) won the 34th Arthur C. Clarke Award, announced online. Serpell receives a check for £2,020 and an engraved bookend.
Other finalists were:
Hench, by Natalie Zina Walschots (William Morrow 978-0062978578, 416pp, $27.99, hardcover) September 2020
Have we reached Peak Deconstruction of Superheroes yet? One could reasonably argue that the trend harks back at least as far as Mad magazine’s “Superduperman” and “Batboy and Rubin” parodies from 1953. Marvel and DC both poked fun at the conventions of the genre during the Sixties, with titles like The Inferior Five and Not Brand ...Read More
Divergence, C.J. Cherryh (DAW 978-0-756-41430-6, $26.00, 339pp, hc) September 2020. Cover by Todd Lockwood.
C.J. Cherryh’s Divergence is not a minor book, but after 20 previous entries in this long-running series, your faithful reviewer is reduced to recommending the entire Foreigner sequence yet again and assuring those already familiar with its pleasures that even after so many books, Cherryh’s hand has not lost its cunning and that there are ...Read More
Seven of Infinities, Aliette de Bodard (Subterranean 978-1-59606-976-3; $40.00, 176pp, hc) October 2020.
I’ve always been impressed by the ways in which different genres can use each other, especially in the hands of an adroit writer who is also an adroit reader. Alix E. Harrow is one example and Aliette de Bodard, who adapted “Beauty and the Beast” into a far-future post colonialist fable with In the Vanishers’ Palace ...Read More
How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It, K.J. Parker (Orbit 978-0-316-49867-8, $16.99, 400pp, tp) August 2020.
Many years on, the walled city in K.J. Parker’s Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City is still under siege. The city still needs to be defended from Ogus, the leader of a rival empire who is keen on wiping out every last person in the Robur empire, most of ...Read More
Piranesi, Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury 978-1-635575637, $27.00, 244pp, hc) September 2020.
The first thing everyone is going to notice about Piranesi, Susanna Clarke’s long-awaited second novel following her enormously popular Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, is that it’s something like a third the length of that blockbuster. The second is that it bears no direct relation to the densely imagined magical 19th century of that novel and of ...Read More
Beneath Ceaseless Skies 6/18/20 Strange Horizons 6/2/20, 6/8/20 Samovar 4/20 Mithila Review #14
Beneath Ceaseless Skies #306 opens with ”Kill the Witchman” by William Broom. A man is drugged and brainwashed with a mission to kill the witchman and his son. As he hunts them he lives in an almost eternal present with no idea of the past and little conception of the future. When he finds ...Read More
Red Dust, Yoss (Restless Books 978-1632062468, $16.99, 208pp, tp) July 2020.
Red Dust, Yoss’s latest novel to be translated into English, is an entertaining yarn narrated by a positronic robot (or “pozzie”) named Raymond in honour of its favourite author. Alongside its fellow automatons, Raymond guards the corridors and docking bays of space-station, the William S. Burroughs, under the eagle-eye of the Galactic Trade Confederation, and its member ...Read More
Longlists for the National Book Awards (NBA) in the Fiction, Young People’s Literature, and Translated Literature categories have been announced, including titles of genre interest.
The Fiction category includes Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam (Ecco), If I Had Two Wings by Randall Kenan (Norton), A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet (Norton), and Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu (Pantheon).
The Young People’s Literature category includes King and the Dragonflies ...Read More
Publisher Two Dollar Radio won the 2020 Voice of the Heartland Award, given “to individuals and organizations who uphold the value of independent bookselling and who have made a significant contribution to bookselling in our combined regions.” The award is given by the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association (GLIBA) and the Midwest Independent Booksellers Association (MIBA). Nominating bookseller Gary Lovely of Book Loft in Columbus, OH called them “a shining ...Read More
Co-editors Coral Alejandra Moore and Eliana González Ugarte announced the creation of Constelación Magazine, “a bilingual magazine of speculative fiction.”
Publishing quarterly, each themed issue will feature original artwork. Stories can be submitted in either English or Spanish; selections will be translated and published in both. Submissions for the first issue open in October, concurrent with the launch Kickstarter.
Joining Moore and Ugarte on staff are Christina Jurado and Libia ...Read More
A Wicked Magic, Sasha Laurens (Razorbill 978-0-593-11725-5, $17.99, 368pp hc) July 2020.
The problems for best friends Dan and Liss began when they found an old book in the local giveaway box in their small North Coast California town. With almost all of its pages blank, they couldn’t resist the appeal of what was printed: “A Spell for the Making of Naive Witches”. They followed the directions and something ...Read More
Author Terry Goodkind, 72, died September 17, 2020. Goodkind was a bestselling writer of epic fantasy.
Born January 11, 1948 in Omaha NE, Goodkind lived in Maine with his wife, Jeri, before they settled near Lake Las Vegas NV. He began publishing his popular Sword of Truth series with novel Wizard’s First Rule (1994) and continued with Stone of Tears (1995), Blood of the Fold (1996), Temple of the Winds ...Read More
John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan Publishers, will be leaving the company and its parent, Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, on January 1, 2021 due to “disagreements regarding the direction of Macmillan.” Sargent has held the position since 2012, after originally joining Holtzbrinck in 1996 as CEO of St. Martin’s Press. Don Weisberg, president of Macmillan US Trade, will take Sargent’s place as CEO. Susan Winslow will move from general manager to president ...Read More
Greg Hullender of Rocket Stack Rank announced that he will be taking an indefinite break from reviewing short stories.
This month marks five years since we started the site, and so it seemed like a good time to pause. Eric will continue to operate the site, producing monthly lists of stories for 11 magazines (with blurbs from the publisher or a few sentences from the story) and aggregating recommendations from ...Read More
The New York Public Library announced Bryan Washington’s Lot (Atlantic) as the winner of its Young Lions Fiction Award for 2020. The $10,000 prize is awarded by a panel of judges “each year to a writer age 35 or younger for a novel or a collection of short stories.” 2019’s winner was Ling Ma’s Severance (Farrar, Straus, Giroux).
For more information, see the official website.
While you are here, please ...Read More
Kiran Kaur Saini is the winner of the Speculative Literature Foundation’s (SLF) 2020 Older Writers Grant, which gives $1,000 to writers “fifty years of age or older at the time of grant application, and is intended to assist such writers who are just starting to work at a professional level.” S.E. Greco, Jeff Reynolds, and Graham Robert Scott received Honorable Mentions.
Applications for the Older Writers Grant are considered from ...Read More
The shortlist for the 2020 Prix Utopiales Bande Dessinée (for best French comic book) has been announced.
As previously reported, finalists for the 2020 Prix Utopiales (for best French SF) and Prix Utopiales Jeunesse Awards
EMILY INKPEN is now represented by the John Jarrold Literary Agency.
MÁRIO SEABRA COELHO is now represented by Stevie Finegan of Zeno Agency.
JOSHUA WINNING is now represented by Kristina Perez of Zeno Agency.
YUDHANJAYA WIJERATNE is now represented by Stevie Finegan of Zeno Agency.
ANGUS WATSON is now represented by Stevie Finegan of Zeno Agency.
PETER S. BEAGLE won the Jack Trevor Story Memorial Prize/Prix du Goncourt, ...Read More
Pulp Literature Spring ’20 Interzone 5-6/20 Galaxy’s Edge 5/20 Reckoning 4
The latest issue of the increasingly interesting Canadian ‘zine Pulp Literature features an engaging story from Matthew Hughes, ”The Bicolour Spiral”, one of his stories about Erm Kaslo, an ”op” (private detective) in Hughes’ Jack Vance-derived science fantasy far-future setting. Kaslo is engaged by a woman to investigate her uncle’s murder because she is going to ...Read More
The Constant Rabbit, Jasper Fforde (Viking 978-0593296523, 320pp, $28, hardcover) September 2020
The trope of uplifted animals is a potent one in science fiction, especially as we advance into a future where humanity’s sheer existence more and more comes to impinge on the rest of animate creation. From Cordwainer Smith’s Underpeople to David Brin’s Uplifted dolphins to Grant Morrison’s trio of assassins, dog, cat and rabbit, in We3; ...Read More
Conjunctions and One Story are among the winners of the 2020 Whiting Literary Magazine Prizes, which “are awarded in print and digital categories to smaller and mid-sized journals with budgets of up to $500,000.” Conjunctions receives a grant of $10,000, with matching grants of up to $10,000 per year for the next two years. One Story receives a grant of $20,000, with matching grants of up to $20,000 per year ...Read More
The Vanished Seas, Catherine Asaro (Baen 978-1-982-12471-7, $16.00, 320pp, tp). July 2020.
Catherine Asaro has been writing novels and shorter works set in her Skolian Empire since the publication of Primary Inversion in 1995. The latest is The Vanished Seas, third in a set of politically oriented mystery novels focussed on private investigator Bhaajan, a former major in the imperial military, whose history and connections with a local, ...Read More
The Omega Sci-Fi Awards, presented by Sci-Fest LA and the Light Bringer Project, are now open for entries in the following competitions:
The Roswell Award short story competition is open to writers 16 years old and up. First place winner receives $500 and access to the UCLA Extension writers’ program. Second prize is $250, and third prize is $100. The Women Hold Up Half the Sky Award, co-presented by Artemis ...Read More
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa (Pantheon) and They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott & Harmony Becker (Top Shelf) are among the winners of the 41st American Book Awards, to be presented October 25, 2020 in an online ceremony. The awards are given by the Before Columbus Foundation for “outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America’s diverse literary community.”
For more information, see ...Read More
The Ladies of Horror Fiction (LOHF) have announced the winners of their annual writers’ grants:
Each will receive $100. The grants are “inclusive to all women who have reasonably demonstrated a commitment to writing in the horror genre” and were funded by Cemetery Gates Media, S.H. Cooper, Andrew Cull, Laurel
