Fireside interim editorial director Brian J. White has announced several changes to the magazine’s management and policies. White will no longer be editorial director, and Pablo Defendini has stepped down from all duties at Fireside Fiction Company.
LeKesha Lewis will take over as publisher, and Chelle Parker will be managing editor. These changes stem from Defendini’s “publication of a racist audio recording” last year.
In order to avoid anything like ...Read More
Robot Artists and Black Swans: The Italian Fantascienza Stories, Bruce Sterling (Tachyon Publications, 978-1616963293, $25.95, 250 pp, hc) March 2021. Cover by John Coulthart.
Few American SF writers are as good at evoking the vibe of parts of the world outside the US as novelist-futurist-journalist Bruce Sterling – it’s something he was working at as far back as Holy Fire (1996), and it became a notable feature of the ...Read More
Yesterday Is History, Kosoko Jackson (Sourcebooks 978-1-4926-9434-2, $17.99, hc, 320pp) February 2021.
Seventeen-year-old Andre Cobb has survived cancer and is six months into receiving a life-saving donor liver as Kosoko Jackson’s achingly romantic time-travel drama, Yesterday Is History, opens. Andre is dearly loved by his parents, has a great best friend and, while he is struggling in school due to his illness-related absences, is still fortunate enough to ...Read More
The Blacktongue Thief, Christopher Buehlman (Tor 978-1250621191, $25.99, 416pp, hc) May 2021.
Author of five previous novels, Christopher Buehlman had not previously fallen across my radar screen. But certainly my enjoyment of his newest, The Blacktongue Thief, will propel me to search out his earlier books. What he has delivered in this sixth of his tales is a glorious overstuffed “secondary world” fantasy that manages to balance the ...Read More
The Planetbreaker’s Son, Nick Mamatas (PM 978-1-62963-834-8, $14.00, 118pp, tp) February 2021.
With all the venues featuring original short fiction these days, one that might be easily overlooked is PM Press’s Outspoken Authors series of chapbooks, each a potpourri of stories and essays, along with a quirky interview with series editor Terry Bisson. It has featured authors as diverse as Ursula K. Le Guin, Nalo Hopkinson, Karen Joy Fowler, ...Read More
Clarkesworld 3/21 Beneath Ceaseless Skies 2/25/21, 3/11/21 Lightspeed 3/21
My two favorite stories in Clarkesworld in March are “Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self” by Isabel J. Kim and “The Orbiting Guan Erye” by Wang Zhenzhen (translated by Carmen Yiling Yan). Kim’s story features an amazingly appropriate use of second-person perspective as “you” are a first-generation Korean immigrant to the US ...Read More
Uncanny 3-4/21 Weird Tales #364
The March-April issue of Uncanny is pretty remarkable. All of the stories are strong. Catherynne M. Valente opens with “The Sin of America“, which expands on the “sin eater” concept in purposefully American fashion, with a bit of the vibe of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” to boot. American fashion here is represented by a clichéd upper Midwest diner and way too much food ...Read More
The International Association of Media Tie-in Writers (IAMTW) announced the nominees for the 2021 Scribe Awards, honoring excellence in licensed tie-in writing. Nominees of genre interest follow.
Original Novel — Speculative
Strange Horizons has announced the departure of editor-in-chief Vanessa Rose Phin, poetry editor Stephen Ira, articles editor Lulu Kadhim, and several first readers. Gautam Bhatia will act as co-ordinating editor, and Romie Stott will be administrative editor.
Keeping with our tendencies towards anarchic cooperation, Strange Horizons will no longer have an Editor-in-Chief, but a more explicitly (strange) horizontal structure; while the several departments have always been autonomous with respect to ...Read More
Carnegie Hall is putting on a city-wide Afrofuturism festival, scheduled to begin February 2022 in New York City. The official announcement says,
Across New York City, leading cultural organizations present multidisciplinary programming that touches African and African diasporic philosophies, speculative fiction, mythology, comics, quantum physics, cosmology, technology, and more. A diverse range of online offerings also includes film screenings, exhibitions, and talks with some of the leading thinkers and creatives ...Read More
The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich (Harper) won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in the Fiction category. The award, given for “distinguished fiction published in book form during the year by an American author, preferably dealing with American life,” comes with a prize of $15,000.
The judges called the winner a “majestic, polyphonic novel about a community’s efforts to halt the proposed displacement and elimination of several Native American tribes in ...Read More
Winners for the 2020 Australian Shadows Awards have been announced. The award is given by the Australian Horror Writers Association (AHWA) for “the finest in horror and dark fiction published by an Australasian within the calendar year.”
Novel
Long Fiction
Stéphane Marsan, co-founder of major French SF imprint Bragelonne, has been accused of inappropriate behavior and sexual harassment by more than 20 people, including authors and former employees. The investigative report was published by French journal Mediapart in April 2021. Marsan wrote an extensive letter in reply, denying any wrongdoing and threatening legal action for defamation. Bragelonne was founded in 1995 by Marsan and Alain Névant, and is widely credited ...Read More
Winners of the 2021 Baltimore Science Fiction Society (BSFS) Poetry Contest have been announced.
The first place winner receives $100, second place receives $75, and third place receives $50, with all
The Ladies of Horror Fiction (LOHF) writers’ organization is accepting applications for its annual grant program now through August 31, 2021. Nine grants of $100 each are available “to all women (cis and trans) and non-binary femmes who have reasonably demonstrated a commitment to writing in the horror genre.” Winners will be announced on September 15, 2021.
For more information, including how to apply or contribute, see the LOHF website. ...Read More
Hachette Book Group published their annual diversity update, covering 2020. They announced increases in staff diversity at all levels in the company, the largest being a 31% increase among senior managers, including directors and higher (though they’re still almost 80% white). Employees identifying as BIPOC increased seven percent in 2020. Acquisitions saw a bump, too: new authors and illustrators of color made up 29% of book deals, compared to 22% ...Read More
A.M. Dellamonica, Amal El-Mohtar & Kelly Robson have co-written fantasy/horror play Dressed as People, a “Triptych of Uncanny Abduction,” directed by Mary Ellis, performed by Margo MacDonald, and featuring music by SIESKI. The play premieres during the Ottawa Fringe Festival, June 17-27, 2021.
For more information, and to buy tickets to view online, see the Ottawa Fringe Festival website.
While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus ...Read More
A few authors of genre interest are on the six-title shortlist for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award:
The £30,000 award is given to a single story “of 6,000 words or less” published in the UK or Ireland. Judges for 2021 are Romesh Gunesekera, Andrew Holgate, Yiyun Li, David Mitchell, and Curtis Sittenfeld.
Five
The City of Good Death, Priyanka Champaneri (Restless Books 978-1-632-06252-9, $28.00, 448pp, hc) February 2021.
Priyanka Champaneri’s debut, The City of Good Death, winner of the 2018 Restless Book Prize for New Immigrant Writing, explores the rituals and customs of death from a non-Western perspective. The story is set in the holy city of Banaras, also known as Kashi, on the banks of the River Ganges, where the ...Read More
Congressional Democrats Ted Lieu (California) and Teresa Leger Fernandez (New Mexico) have introduced a new bill, “The 21st Century Federal Writers’ Project”, which proposes $60 million in funding to non-profit organizations, libraries, news organizations, and writing-related unions to support writers who lost income during the pandemic. The proposed legislation is inspired by the Federal Writers’ Project from 1935, which employed thousands of writers during the Great Depression. One goal of ...Read More
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) announced winners of the 2020 Nebula Awards at the 56th Annual Nebula Banquet during the 2021 SFWA Nebula Conference.
Nalo Hopkinson became the 37th Damon Knight Grand Master, for her contributions to the literature of science fiction and fantasy. The Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. Service to SFWA Award was presented to Connie Willis. The Kate Willhelm Solstice Award was presented to Ben ...Read More
The sale of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s publishing company, HMH Books & Media, to News Corp (parent company of HarperCollins) is complete… and doesn’t include the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt name, which the original parent company intends to keep for its technology business. HarperCollins says they will phase out use of the name, ending a legacy that began over a century and a half ago when Boston printer Henry Houghton branched out ...Read More
Day Zero, C. Robert Cargill (Harper Voyager 978-0062405807, $27.99, 304pp, hc) May 2021.
This era seems a Golden Age for fictional examinations of artificial intelligence, plumbing the deeper meaning of robot consciousness and even silicon emotions. With recent novels such as Today I Am Carey, Set My Heart to Five, Barren Cove, and The Hierarchies, along with films like Ex Machina, Zoe, Blade Runner ...Read More
Bloomsbury Publishing in the UK has purchased independent publisher Head of Zeus (HoZ) for £8.5 million (just over $12 million), including payments of pre-existing loans. Head of Zeus publishes genre authors including P.C. Cast, Terry Goodkind, Cixin Liu, Ken Liu, Lavie Tidhar, and many others.
Bloomsbury’s official announcement said, “This acquisition will provide a strong addition to Bloomsbury’s thriving Consumer division and support our long term Consumer growth strategy, with ...Read More
The Gilded Ones, Namina Forna (Delacorte Press/Penguin Random House 978-1-984-84869-7, $18.99, 432pp, hc) February 2021.
If you are in search of a feminist, epic fantasy filled with formidable girls healing from their trauma, killing monsters in the style of 300, and discovering their inner power despite the patriarchy, you may want to start with The Gilded Ones.
All 16-year-old Deka wants is acceptance from her village, even ...Read More
Winners of the 2021 Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, honoring the best SF/F work published in France in 2020, have been announced: ...Read More
The Memory Theater, Karin Tidbeck (Pantheon 978-1-5247-4833-3, $25.95, 240pp, hc) February 2021.
One of the more memorable figures in Karin Tidbeck’s Crawford Award-winning collection Jagganath was the title character of the story “Augusta Prime”, an epically supercilious aristocrat whose idea of entertainment was to smash her croquet ball into the face of an attending page. Augusta lived in a kind of polder (in the John Clute sense), a garden ...Read More
