Locus Online

The Freeze-Frame Revolution, by Peter Watts (Tachyon Publications 978-1-61696-252-4, $14.95, 192pp, trade paperback) June 2018

In 2014, I concluded my Locus Online review of Peter Watts’s Echopraxia by saying, “Peter Watts is some precisely engineered hybrid of Lucius Shepard and Gregory Benford, lyrical yet hard-edged, purveyor of sleek surfaces and also the ethical and spiritual contents inside.” I am happy to report, after a torturous wait of four years, ...Read More

The Outsider, Stephen King (Scribner 978-1-5011-8098-9, $30.00, 576pp, hc) May 2018.

Stephen King’s last three published novels – excluding his collaborations with Richard Chizmar and his son Owen King – comprise a triptych informally known as the Bill Hodges trilogy, named for the retired police detective who is their main character. As a unit – and they are a unit, forged by Hodges’s recurring pas-de-deux through them with supernaturally endowed ...Read More

Head On, John Scalzi (Tor 978-07-6538891-9,$25.99, 336pp, hc) April 2018.

John Scalzi’s Head On picks up where Lock In left off, for the most part. FBI agent Chris Shane still has Haden’s Syndrome, a condition where an infected person’s body remains inert while his or her mind roams free in a robotlike machine called a threep. Chris’s partner Leslie Vann, who does not have Haden’s, still remains the more impulsive ...Read More

Annex, Rich Larson (Orbit 978-0-316-41654-2, $15.95, 336pp, tp) July 2018.

By his own count, Rich Larson has published over 100 stories since 2012, with an impressive number of them making it into year’s best anthologies. That amounts to one of the more stunning debuts in recent SF, even as he’s largely been under the radar for major awards (possibly in part because of that very prolificity). This inevitably creates a ...Read More

Meet Me in the Strange, Leander Watts (Meerkat 978-1-946154-15-6, $16.95, 234pp, hc) March 2018.

This is one unique book.

I was chapters into Meet Me in the Strange before I fully realized that the reviewer part of my brain needed to be turned off (stop noting names and locations, stop paying attention to setting descriptions and plot development) and I just needed to take the ride this book was offering. ...Read More

Gnomon, Nick Harkaway (William Heinemann 978-1785151279, £14.99, 704pp, hc) November 2017. (Knopf 978-1524732080, $28.95, 688pp, hc) January 2018.

I know I’m late to the work of Nick Harkaway. I’ve meant to read his fiction since the publication of The Gone-Away World back in 2008, I even bought the book, but, for whatever reason, never cracked open the covers. I was planning on picking up Gnomon, until I saw it was ...Read More

Half a dozen letters from J.R.R. Tolkien sold at auction in May 2018 for a total of $36,000, with individual letters selling from $2,700 to $13,000. Two of the letters were sent to artist Mary Fairburn in 1968, praising illustrations of The Lord of the Rings she’d sent him, and including a signed original sketch by Fairburn. The other letters were to Oscar Morland (a British ambassador), Baronne A. Baeyens, ...Read More

Blood’s a Rover, by Harlan Ellison (Subterranean 978-1596068681, $40.00, 232pp, hardcover) June 30, 2018

The tradition of creating “fixups“–a narrative assembled from previously published pieces, sometimes with new interleaved material, and then issued as an organic whole–is a grand one in science fiction. Such masterpieces as Simak’s City and Vance’s The Eyes of the Overworld have arisen from this process. (The term was coined by A. E. van Vogt ...Read More

N.K. Jemisin will receive the annual Best of Brooklyn (BoBi) Award, and “is the first author of speculative fiction to win the BoBi.”

“The Brooklyn Book Festival (BKBF) is the largest free literary event in New York City, presenting an array of national and international literary stars and emerging authors.” The event will be held September 10-17, 2018 in New York with “more than 300 authors plus 250 booksellers filling ...Read More

Several individuals of genre interest are among the 1,057 people recognized by the Queen of England in her 2018 Birthday Honours list.

Writer Kazuo Ishiguro was knighted “for services to literature,” and bookstore founder Tim Waterstone received a knighthood for “services to bookselling and charity.”

Authors Jeanette Winterson and Ken Follett received the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for “services to Literature” and “services to Literature ...Read More

How To Stop Time, Matt Haig (Canongate 978-1-782-11861-9, £12.99, 33699, hc) July 2017. (Viking 978-0-525-52287-4, $26.00, 329pp, hc) February 2018.

The notion that living among us there might be immortals – or at least folks with very long lifespans – is itself an idea that just hangs on decade after decade, not only in SF/F circles but in popular potboilers like Viereck & Eldridge’s hoary My First Two Thousand Years ...Read More

Literary Arts has posted the video of their tribute event for Ursula K. Le Guin featuring “Margaret Atwood (by video), Molly Gloss, Walidah Imarisha, Jonathan Lethem, Kelly Link, China Miéville, and Daniel José Older.” The event took place on June 13, 2018 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland OR. For more information, and to view the video, see the Literary Arts tribute page.

While you are here, please ...Read More

NPR‘s summer reader poll 2018 is open to nominations of horror novels, collections, series, and short stories. Readers can nominate up to five titles through an online form. A top 100 list will be curated by Tananrive Due, Ruthanna Emrys, Grady Hendrix, and Stephen Graham Jones and announced later in the year.

For more information, see the NPR website.

While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus ...Read More

Frankenstein in Baghdad, Ahmed Saadawi, translated by Jonathan Wright (Penguin Books 978-0143128793, $16.00, 288pp, tp) January 2018.

Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad places the eponymous monster amongst the suicide bombings and devastation of Baghdad in 2005. It opens with an attack on Tayaran Square where a soul, torn from its body, finds a home in a vacated corpse. It’s no ordinary cadaver, but rather a stitched-together amalgamation of parts, the ...Read More

The Robert E. Howard Foundation has announced the winners for its 2018 REH Foundation Awards.

The Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP) announced the 2017 inductees to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame: comic book writer and publisher Stan Lee, author J.K. Rowling, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series, and The Legend of Zelda video game series. The inductees will be included in the SF&F Hall of Fame display later this year.

The Science Fiction Hall of Fame was founded in 1996 and ...Read More

Solar Bones by Mike McCormack (Tramp) has won the €100,000 2018 International Dublin Literary Award, announced by Mícheál Mac Donncha, Lord Mayor of Dublin, during a ceremony at the Mansion House in Dublin Ireland on June 13, 2018. The  award, “the world’s largest prize for a single novel published in English,” receives nominations from public libraries around the world and selects the winner by jury. The 2018 judging panel consisted ...Read More

The Horror Writers Association (HWA) has announced the addition of a new Short Non-Fiction category to its Bram Stoker Awards. HWA president Lisa Morton said:

Works qualifying for the new award category include magazine articles, short essays, and academic papers, all of which must be at least 2,000 words but less than 40,000 words. The works must be published in a book (print or e-format), a magazine (print or online), ...Read More

Midnight at the Electric, Jodi Lynn Anderson (Harper Teen 978-0-06-239354-8, $17.99, 257pp, hc) June 2017.

Jodi Lynn Anderson accomplishes something unique with Midnight at the Electric, taking a novel clearly set in the future, (the protagonist has just been accepted to a Mars colony program), but grounding it in a historical mystery. This is science fiction that has broad potential appeal; traditional SF readers will be attracted to the glimpses ...Read More

Winners of the 2018 Kurd Laßwitz Preis for best German science fiction works and translations have been announced:

Peter Watts’ The Freeze-Frame Revolution, Yoon Ha Lee’s Revenant Gun, Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Ten, a book by Douglas E. Cowan about religious themes in Stephen King, and other titles by Jacqueline Carey, C. Robert Cargill, John Connolly, K.D. Edwards, R.S. Ford, Simon R. Green, A.J. Hartley, and Dave Hutchinson. ...Read More