Locus Online

How to Fracture a Fairy Tale, Jane Yolen (Tachyon 978-1-61696-306-4, $16.95, 320pp, tp) November 2018.

Chances are that not every reader of Jane Yo­len’s collection How to Fracture a Fairy Tale – which follows close upon her World Fantasy Award winning The Emerald Circus – will remember the classic Rocky and Bullwinkle segments from nearly 60 years ago, narrated by Edward Everett Horton, which as far as I know ...Read More

Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea by Sarah Pinsker (Small Beer Press 978-1-61873-155-5, $17, 286pp, trade paperback) March 2019

Having published her first story as recently as 2012 — that date surely seems barely in the rearview mirror to me, although your personal chrono-mileage may vary — Sarah Pinsker has accomplished a lot. With nearly fifty stories to her credit, and a couple of major awards, she has ...Read More

Alliance Rising, C.J. Cherryh & Jane S. Fancher (DAW 9780756412715, $26.00, 352pp, hc) Janu­ary 2019. Cover by Micah Epstein.

Alliance Rising is the first novel to be published by the partnership of SFWA Grand Master C.J. Cherryh and her wife, author and artist Jane S. Fancher. It’s also the latest novel to be set in Cherryh’s Alliance-Union continuity, a literary universe that incorporates novels like Downbelow Station and Cyteen ...Read More

The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky, John Hornor Jacobs (Harper Voyager $3.99 127pp, eb) Oc­tober 2018.

John Hornor Jacobs’s The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky is an excellently written, Lovecraft-inflected novella concerned with the history of an invented South American nation and the life of its most famous poet. It begins in Malaga, Spain, in 1987, with Isabel, the first-person narrator, noticing an older man wearing an ...Read More

Faerie Knitting, Alice & Lisa Hoffman; Janu­ary LaVoy, narrator (Simon & Schuster Audio/Blackstone Audio 978-150827645-6, $21.99, CD, 1.5 hr., unabridged [also available as a digital download]) September 2018.

Somewhere I have a half-finished article that I always intended to submit to a knitting maga­zine, concerning the strong parallels between SF geekery and knitting geekery. Both involve a certain intensity of focus on the topic, utilize a specialized vocabulary, hold ...Read More

Unholy Land, Lavie Tidhar (Tachyon Publica­tions 978-1616963040, $15.95, 288pp, tp) October 2018.

In 1938 (or possibly 1939) there was a plan to settle European Jews facing rising anti-semitism in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. It never eventuated. More than a century prior, and a good 80 years before the establishment of modern-day Zionism, Mordechai Manuel Noah attempted to establish a Jewish State, called Ararat, in Grand Island NY. ...Read More

Jane Crowley and Kate Dollarhyde are stepping down as editors-in-chief of Strange Horizons, with Vanessa Rose Phin taking over the role. Crowley and Dollarhyde said:

Friends and fellow readers, we come bearing bittersweet news: the time has come for us to move along. We’re stepping down from our positions as editors-in-chief and passing the torch to Vanessa Rose Phin, who’s served the magazine ably in several capacities during vees ...Read More

Finalists for the 2019 Colorado Book Awards include the following titles of genre interest:

Shimmer 11/18
Clarkesworld 11/18
Lightspeed 12/18

As we say goodbye to 2018 we also bid a fond farewell to Shimmer, as their 46th issue is their last. After 13 years of pub­lication they go out in style with a 12-story triple issue that showcases the wide range of genre fic­tion that found a home between their covers over the years. It starts strongly with “Rotkäppchen” by Emily ...Read More

Philip Pullman won the 2019 J.M. Barrie Award, given annually by the Action for Children’s Arts (ACA) “to a children’s arts practitioner or organisation in recognition of a lifetime’s achievement in delighting children.”

ACA chair Vicky Ireland said:

The Trustees selected Sir Philip Pullman as the winner of the ACA JM Barrie Award 2019, for his outstanding talent as a storyteller who appeals to all ages, especially to the young. ...Read More

Uncommon Miracles, Julie C. Day (PS 978-1-786363-34-3, £20.00, 234pp, hc) October 2018.

Well, aren’t we about overdue for the bunny apoc­alypse? That seems to be the question Julie C. Day raises in “Everyone Gets a Happy Ending”, the lead story in her first collection Uncommon Miracles, and it’s not quite as whimsical as it sounds. It follows the familiar pattern of end-of-days tales, with two friends making their ...Read More

The Carnegie Medal shortlist for best children’s book has been announced. Titles of genre interest follow.

The award is presented by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP). The winner will be ...Read More

Murmur by Will Eaves (Bellevue) and My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin) are on the six-title shortlist for the 2019 Wellcome Book Prize.

The £30,000 prize “rewards exceptional works of literature that illuminate the many ways that health, medicine and illness touch our lives.” Judges for 2019 are Jon Day, Rick Edwards, Kevin Fong, Viv Groskop, and Elif Shafak (chair). The winner will be announced on ...Read More

Winners of the 2019 Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award have been announced.

The Grand Prize winning story will be featured on the Baen website in June 2019. The author will be given a trophy and paid a professional rate.

Grand Prize, second, and third place winners each receive free admission into the ...Read More

Foundryside, Robert Jackson Bennett; Tara Sands, narrator (Random House Audio, $32.95, digital download, 19.5 hr., unabridged) August 2018.

The city of Tevanne runs on magitech: “Scrivings,” writings based on the relics of an ancient magical civilization, are used to power vehicles and all manner of technologi­cal innovations. But only the wealthy merchant guilds and their employees benefit from these, or indeed, from any public services at all. The guild­less ...Read More

Winners have been announced for the inaugural “Favorite SF in Translation” award, given to non-Anglophone speculative fiction that has been translated into English and published between January 1 and December 31, 2018. The winners were chosen by a readers’ survey.

Several award winners were announced at the 40th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA), held March 13-16, 2019 at the Orlando Airport Marriott in Orlando FL.

Readymade Bodhisattva: The Kaya Anthology of South Korean Science Fiction, Sunyung Park & Sang Joon Park, eds. (Kaya Press 978-1-885030-57-3, $24.95, 434pp, tp) March 2019.

With Chinese SF gaining such prominence lately, and Japanese SF having been more or less familiar to Western readers for decades (I reviewed the first English-language study of Japanese SF way back in 1992!), it’s reasonable to be curious about what else is going ...Read More

I Am the River, T.E. Grau (Lethe Press 978-1590214459, $15.00, 220pp, tp) October 2018.

The decision of the Man Booker judges to award Anna Burns’s stream of conscious­ness novel Milkman with the top prize for 2018 triggered a fresh bout of navel-gazing amongst reviewers and critics about the accessibil­ity of literary fiction. In a fantastic, erudite article for The Guardian (“Pretentious, impenetrable, hard work… better? Why we need difficult ...Read More

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks ((John Joseph Adams 978-1-328-56645-4, $24, 304pp, hardcover, February 2019)

Arguably, we live in a golden age for ghost stories, of an excellence and profusion on a par with the Victorian era classics. Writers such as Mike Carey, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Tim Powers, and Paul Tremblay are working in this mode at the top of their game. As an article in ...Read More

Bluecrowne, Kate Milford (Clarion Books 978-1328-466884, $17.99, 255pp, hc) October 2018.

In this prequel to The Left-Handed Fate and her popular books about Greenglass House, author Kate Milford ties together elements from across her sprawling literary landscape to show how, basically, a whole lot of things hap­pened for the first time. It is unnecessary to read any of her other books to enjoy Bluecrowne, however, although new readers ...Read More

Winners of the 2019 Darrell Awards were announced March 16, 2019 during MidSouthCon 37 at the Hilton Memphis in Memphis TN.

The People’s Republic of Everything, Nick Mamatas (Tachyon 978-1-61696-300-2, $15.95, 336pp, tp) September 2018.

Nick Mamatas is one of my favorite story writers, mostly because I never know what I’m going to encounter under his byline: satirical SF, black-hearted noir, sly his­torical reimaginings, clear-eyed twists on the Lovecraft mythos, open calls for revolution, left­ist politics (and critiques thereof), and weirder things. His latest collection, The People’s Republic of Everything ...Read More

The Mere Wife, Maria Dahvana Head­ley; Susan Bennett, narrator (Macmillan Audio 978-1-42729783-9, $44.99, CD, 9 hr., unabridged [also available as a digital down­load]) July 2018.

Maria Dahvana Headley transforms Beowulf into a modern, vicious, and lyrical story about racial, class, and gender divides, and the messy legacy of gentrification. Dana Mills was an African-American marine fighting a desert war when the enemy slaughtered her team, kidnapped her, faked her ...Read More

Random House publisher Susan Kamil announced the closure of imprint Spiegel & Grau:

I am very sorry to announce that with the reorganization of our Group, Cindy Speigel and Julie Grau will be leaving the company, and the Spiegel & Grau imprint, which they have led for the past thirteen years, will be discontinued.

The imprint was launched at Doubleday in 2007 and joined Random House in 2008, and published ...Read More

Cross Her Heart, Sarah Pinborough (HarperCol­lins UK 978-0008132019, £12.99, 384pp, hc) May 2018. (Morrow 9780062856791 $26.99, 352pp, hc) September 2018.

As was the case with Behind Her Eyes, Sarah Pinborough’s previous bestseller, there’s a sig­nificant plot twist in Cross Her Heart, her new novel. The difference is, this crook in the narra­tive arrives at roughly its halfway point and is only the first of several which accelerate ...Read More