Locus Online

F&SF 5-6/18
Clarkesworld 4/18
Beneath Ceaseless Skies 4/12/18, 4/26/18

In the May-June F&SF my preferred sto­ries were from relatively new voices. Pip Coen‘s first stories appeared last year, and Brian Trent has only been publishing a bit longer. Coen’s “Inquisitive” is the tale of the life of a decidedly non-neurotypical young woman, Saffi Kenyon, and her school career, in which her blunt inquisitiveness puts her on the path to entry ...Read More

European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, Theodora Goss (Saga 978-1-4814-6653-0, $26.99, 720pp, hc) July 2018.

When Theodora Goss introduced us to the members of the Athena Club in last year’s The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, that fun she was having with her lively and contentious group of women was contagious, but that fun masked a more provocative reconsideration of the roles imposed on women in Victorian society – ...Read More

The Expert System’s Brother, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor.com 978-1-25019755-9, $14.99, 176pp, tp) July 2018.

It’s amazing how much world building Adrian Tchaikovsky packs into so few words in The Expert System’s Brother. In other hands, this story of a young man, Handry, who is forced out of a world that literally no longer recognizes him, could be the work of a trilogy, yet, here, it is the perfect length. ...Read More

The Hunger, Alma Katsu (Putnam 978-0-06-7352-1251-0, $27.00, 38pp, hc) March 2018.

The tragic fate of the Donner Party is one of the true American horror stories of the 19th century. The collective of 87 family members and individuals set out from Missouri in May 1846 as part of a larger California-bound wagon train caravan. They epitomized the American pioneer spirit and the nation’s snowballing sense of manifest destiny. Soon thereafter, ...Read More

Spinning Silver, Naomi Novik. (Del Rey, 978-0-399-18098-9, $28.00, 434 pp, hc.) July 2018.

Naomi Novik follows Uprooted with a brilliant retelling of Rumpelstiltskin set in a medieval pseudo-Russia. Instead of a miller’s daughter, the protagonist, Miryem, is a moneylender’s daughter. Instead of spinning straw into gold, she can spin silver coins into gold, if she has time to take them through the marketplace, first. The King of the Staryk, the ...Read More

The Book of Hidden Things, by Francesco Dimitri (Titan 978-1-785-65707-8, $14.95, 385pp, trade paperback) July 2018

Authors who write splendid books in languages other than their native tongue must all be rounded up and stopped, so they don’t make us struggling monolinguists look bad. Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov–well, they’re already canonized. But we still face Salman Rushdie, Hannu Rajaniemi, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, and Lavie Tidhar, among others. Their excellent ...Read More

The 2017 Shirley Jackson Awards winners were announced July 15, 2018 during Readercon 29 at the Quincy Marriott in Quincy MA. The awards are presented for outstanding achievement in horror, psychological suspense, and dark fantasy fiction.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) has named three nominees for their Grand Master award: LeRoy Gorman, David Lunde, and Ann K. Schwader.

The title is given “to an individual living at the time of selection whose body of work reflects the highest artistic goals of the SFPA, who has been actively publishing within the target genres of Science Fiction and Fantasy for a period of no fewer ...Read More

Frank M. Robinson (1926-2014) is the winner of the 2018 Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, intended to bring attention to lesser-known SF and fantasy authors. This year’s judges were Elizabeth Hand, Barry Malzberg, Mike Resnick, and Robert J. Sawyer. The award was announced July 13, 2018 during Readercon 29 at the Quincy Marriott in Quincy MA.

For more information about the award, see the Cordwainer Smith Foundation website.

While you are ...Read More

The 2018 David Gemmell Awards winners were announced at a ceremony July 14, 2018 at Edge-Lit 7 in Derby, UK:

The North Carolina Speculative Fiction Foundation (NCSFF) announced the winner of the 2018 Manly Wade Wellman Award during ConGregate 5 held July 13-15, 2018 at the Red Lion Hotel in High Point NC. The award recognizes “outstanding achievement in science fiction and fantasy novels written by North Carolina authors.”

WisCon 42 was held May 25-28, 2018 at the Concourse Hotel in balmy Madison WI, with Saladin Ahmed and Tananarive Due as guests of honor. 924 full memberships were sold, plus 71 single day memberships. Programming offered 140 panels, solo presentations, and roundtables, focused on SF/F literature, diversity, feminism, disability, criticism, and more. Other options included 19 reading slots with 68 authors, 23 writing workshops, 12 kids’ items, 10 gaming ...Read More

The Quantum Magician, Derek Künsken (Solaris 978-1781085707, $11.99, 480pp, tp) October 2018.

This debut novel will do well. It is a fat, fun SF heist-thriller, a sort of Ocean’s 2487. Or The Superstring Sting. Or The It’s-alien Job. Or anything, really, rather than the oddly sword-and-sorcery-ish title Künsken has gone with. Get past the title, though, and the reader settles into a readable, eventful adventure narrative in which the jinks ...Read More

Finalists for the 2018 Endeavour Award have been announced:

The award “honors a distinguished science fiction or fantasy book, either a novel or a single-author collection, created by a writer living in the Pacific Northwest.” The ...Read More

The Descent of Monsters, JY Yang (Tor.com Publishing 9 78-1-250-16585-5, $14.99, 168pp, tp). July 2018. Cover by Yuko Shimizo.

JY Yang has garnered several award nominations for The Black Tides of Heaven. Along with The Red Threads of Fortune, to which it is closely linked, The Black Tides of Heaven – a Hugo finalist in the Best Novella category, as well as a Nebula nominee – was published last August ...Read More

The European Science Fiction Society (ESFS) Hall of Fame Awards, Achievement Awards, and Chrysalis Award nominees have been announced, along with the names of the nominating countries:

Lightspeed 5/18
Tor.com 4/11/18
Giganotosaurus 2/18, 3/18, 4/18

The SF in the May Lightspeed interested me most. Carolyn Ives Gilman’s “We Will Be All Right” is a very short, dark reflection on a future in which a gender-based pathogen kills men when their lovers conceive. The narrator is ready to meet her son’s girlfriend… as I said, it’s a short piece, and mostly a meditation, and quite effective in its ...Read More

The Calculating Stars, Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor 978-0765378385, $15.99, 432pp, tp) July 2018.

Mary Robinette Kowal was writing about midcentury female NASA workers before they hit the pop culture mainstream. While Hidden Figures – both book and movie – brought our collective attention to the women who worked as ‘‘calculators’’ at NASA, Kowal started noodling around with the idea in 2012. Her ‘‘The Lady Astronaut of Mars’’ started life as ...Read More

Finalists for the fifth annual Baen Fantasy Adventure Award have been announced:

The contest ...Read More

Winners of the Heinlein Society’s annual undergraduate scholarships for the 2018-2019 academic year were announced July 7, 2018. This year’s winners are Carson Butler, Reese Caldwell, and Emma Sebesta. The scholarship awards $1,500 to each recipient.

Butler received the Virginia Heinlein Memorial Scholarship, which is dedicated to female candidates majoring in engineering, math, or science. Caldwell received the Dr. Jerry Pournelle Memorial Scholarship, and Sebesta received the Dr. Yoji Kondo ...Read More