XX by Angela Chadwick won the 2019 Polari First Book Prize, announced October 22, 2019 during the London Literature Festival held at the Southbank Centre in London, England. The £1,000 prize celebrates “work that explores the LGBT experience.” Judges for 2019 were Kiki Archer, Paul Burston (chair), Cerys Evans, Rachel Holmes, and John McCullough.
For more information, see the Polari Prize website.
While you are here, please take a moment ...Read More
Silver in the Wood, Emily Tesh (Tor.com Publishing 978-1-250-22979-3, $11.99, 110pp, tp) June 2019.
Think of the loveliest, most shivery story you ever read, perhaps from a crumbling book of folk tales, and combine it with a book of nature writing. Add queer romance, a steely mama witch hunter, and the tension of knowing what a sweet, silly love interest doesn’t know. That is Silver in the Wood. ...Read More
Black Static 5-6/19 Uncanny 5-6/19
The usual five original stories in Black Static #69 begin with “Where It Ends, Where It Begins” by Erinn L. Kemper. Old Mac salvages the sea on the west coast of Vancouver Island. For ten years, along with the usual fare, he’s also salvaged decaying body parts that he keeps in a freezer. Now he has collected an entire body’s worth of ...Read More
The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday, Saad Z. Hossain (Tor.com 978-1-250-20911-5, $14.99, 176pp, tp) August 2019.
Saad Z. Hossein’s pissed-off djinn, awakened after thousands of years by melting ice in the Himalayas (a nice, subtle reference to global warming), initially seems more concerned with his resumé than with vengeance: when he stumbles down the mountain and meets the crusty old Gurkha Bhan Gurung, he announces himself as “Melek ...Read More
Salvation Lost, Peter F. Hamilton (Del Rey 978-0399178856, 512pp, $32.00, hardcover) October 2019
I’m always chuffed when a review of mine provides a sentence that is deemed blurb-worthy by a publisher. This just happened with my review of Peter Hamilton’s novel Salvation from 2018. I appear on the back cover of the brand-new sequel, Salvation Lost, saying, “It’s a bravura performance from start to finish… Hamilton is juggling ...Read More
Fantastic Worlds: The Art of William Stout, Ed Leimbacher (Insight Editions 978-1-60887-865-9, $75.00, 333pp, hc) November 2018. Cover by William Stout.
From the small to the large: Fantastic Worlds: The Art of William Stout is a great big book offering great big fun in 331 pages filled with colorful and varied artwork. It’s the kind of retrospective that any artist would dream about. The artwork is well reproduced in ...Read More
Empress of Forever, Max Gladstone (Tor 978-0-7653-9581-8, 18.99, 480pp, hc) June 2019. Cover art by Tommy Arnold.
Max Gladstone is best known for the Craft Sequence, a fantasy series about demons, angels, and insurance adjusters. With Empress of Forever, he’s crossing the imaginary divide between fantasy and science fiction to spin a space opera that is as lyrical and surreal as his earlier work.
The story starts on ...Read More
“The Thing in the Walls Wants Your Small Change” by Virginia M. Mohlere (Luna Station Quarterly 5/18) is the winner of the 2019 Washington Science Fiction Association (WSFA) Small Press Award for Short Fiction.
Other finalists were “The Tale of the Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters, and the Prince Who Was Made of Meat”, Brooke Bolander (Uncanny 7-8/18); “Familiar in Her Angles”, E.A. Brenner (Metaphorosis 9/21/18); “Baggage”, Leslie Burton-Lopez (When ...Read More
The 2019 Aurora Awards winners were announced during an awards ceremony held at Can-Con 2019, October 19, 2019, in Ottawa ON.
Best Novel
Velocity Weapon, Megan O’Keefe (Orbit US 978-0-356-51222-8, $15.99, 544pp, tp) June 2019.
There’s really only one problem with Velocity Weapon, Megan E. O’Keefe’s first novel-length space opera, and that problem is something which ultimately isn’t a problem at all: the cover copy makes it sound like a vastly different novel than it really is, and kept me from enthusiastically devouring it for ages.
The last thing Sanda remembers is ...Read More
Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory: Stories, Raphael Bob-Waksberg (Knopf 978-1524732011, $25.95, 256pp, hc) June 2019.
Back in June IndieWire published an article listing the best TV shows of the last decade. BoJack Horseman was ranked number four behind three deserving and ground-breaking productions: Breaking Bad, Fleabag, and The Leftovers. BoJack Horseman, though, could easily have finished in the top spot. ...Read More
American Science Fiction: Eight Classic Novels of the 1960s, Gary K. Wolfe, ed. (Library of America 978-1-59853-635-5, $75.00, 1,500pp, hc, boxed set) November 2019. Also available as American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1960-1966 (Library of America 978-1-59853-501-3, $37.50, 738pp, hc) November 2019 and American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1968-1969, (Library of America 978-1-59853-502-0, $37.50, 762 pp, hc) November 2019. Covers by Paul Lehr.
Reviewing is generally ...Read More
Winners for the 2019 Geffen Awards for best science fiction and fantasy published in Hebrew have been announced by the Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Best Translated Science Fiction Book
Best Translated Fantasy Book
Stephen & Tabitha King have received city council approval to rezone their Bangor ME home as a non-profit, with plans to turn it into a museum. Stephen King’s personal archives, previously housed at the University of Maine, will be moved to the home and made available to scholars and other visitors by appointment. A house next door, also owned by the Kings, will accommodate up to five writers-in-residence at a ...Read More
The Dark 5/19, 6/19 Nightmare 6/19, 7/19 Apex 5/19
The Dark #48 offers two new stories. In Angela Slatter‘s “The Wilderling“, isolated, bored, childless LP is fascinated with a feral child who visits her yard. One might expect LP to do something other than what she does for or with the savage kid. Mystery grows as LP’s actions defy expectation. Slatter, with perfect pacing and accomplished writing, ...Read More
My Beautiful Life, K.J. Parker (Subterranean 978-1-59606-930-5, $40.00, 112pp, hc) November 2019.
Unlike the long tradition of disruptive but fundamentally decent rogues, K.J. Parker’s invidious protagonists, who are often his narrators, can almost seem ingratiating in their forthrightness and cynicism – until we catch on to what sort of ruthlessness they are really capable of. It’s not giving anything away to point out that Parker’s new novella My Beautiful ...Read More
Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight, Aliette de Bodard (Subterranean 978-1-59606-952-7, $40.00, 384pp, hc) September 2019. Cover by Maurizio Manzieri.
Aliette de Bodard’s Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight is a collection from an author whose work possesses both breadth and depth. Published by Subterranean Press, this volume largely collects works from her Hugo Award-nominated Xuya continuity – including award-winning stories “The Shipmaker” (BSFA Award), “Immersion” (Nebula and Locus ...Read More
The Horror Writers Association (HWA) has announced Mick Garris as media guest of honor for StokerCon UK, to be held April 16-19, 2020 at the Royal and Grand Hotels in Scarborough, UK. He joins previously announced guests Kim Newman, Grady Hendrix, and Gillian Redfearn, with A.K. Benedict as mistress of ceremonies and Robert Lloyd-Parry as special guest.
For more <stokercon-uk.com/guests.htm>.
While you are here, please take a moment to ...Read More
Patricia Briggs, Storm Cursed (Ace 978-0-425-28129-1, $27.00, 358pp, hc) May 2019. Cover by Daniel Dos Santos.
The 11th novel in the Mercy Thompson series finds Mercy back home in Washington’s Tri-Cities area, and a little more in the public eye than she cares for, thanks to having publically declared the area under the Columbia Basin pack’s protection a couple of books back, so now she gets called to deal with ...Read More
New titles this week are by Nina Allan, Harold Bloom, Elizabeth Bowen, Daniel Braum, John Connolly, Nicky Drayden, S.C. Emmett, Derek Künsken, Joel Levy, Laurence MacNaughton, Benjamin Percy, Madeleine Roux, Priya Sharma, and Tade Thompson. ...Read More
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (Vintage, Chatto & Windus) and Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (Hamish Hamilton) were announced as joint winners of the 2019 Booker Prize during a ceremony held October 14, 2019 at the Guildhall in London, UK.
The Booker rules forbid splitting the prize, but chair of judges Peter Florence said, “We were told quite firmly that the rules state we can only have one winner. ...Read More
The winners for the 2018 Sidewise Awards for Alternate History have been announced.
Long Form
Short Form
In
Trace, Pat Cummings (HarperCollins 978-0-06-269884-1, $16.99, 320pp, hc) April 2019.
Sometimes, readers want a gentle story with big-hearted characters that manages to convey powerful drama in a subtle plot. Trace by Pat Cummings is exactly that, a ghost story that combines an unfolding historical mystery with a heartfelt coming-of-age tale. It is a muted novel, as much about the struggle of adapting to a new family situation as it ...Read More
Literary critic Harold Bloom, 89, died October 14, 2019 in a New Haven CT hospital. Bloom was one of the most famous and controversial critics in America, writing and editing bestselling, influential volumes like The Anxiety of Influence (1973), Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994), and How to Read and Why (2000). In all he wrote more than ...Read More
Winners for the 2019 Imadjinn Awards were announced during Imaginarium 2019, held October 11-13, 2019 at the Ramada Plaza Hotel and Conference Center in Louisville KY. Categories of genre interest include:
Best Science Fiction Novel
Best Fantasy Novel
The James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award has been renamed the Otherwise Award, announced by members of the Tiptree Motherboard on October 13, 2019. In a statement, they said:
The Tiptree Award was named as a joyful joke, 28 years ago.
James Tiptree, Jr/Alice Sheldon is a complicated figure who has grown more so as participants in the sff world have gained more diverse perspectives and more acute critical analyses. In ...Read More
