Locus Online

A Peculiar Peril, Jeff VanderMeer (Macmillan/ Farrar, Straus, Giroux 978-0-374-30886-5, $19.99, 656pp, hc) July 2020.

Jeff VanderMeer’s relationship with the Lambhead family goes back to 2003 when he and Mark Roberts co-edited The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, a compendium of weird and wonderful ailments, featuring well over 30 entries (and illustrations) from authors as diverse as Neil Gaiman, Jeffrey Ford, L. ...Read More

Oasis, Katya De Becerra (Imprint 978-1-250- 12426-5, $17.99, 302pp, hc) January 2020.

Oasis begins as a traditional set-up for a teen drama involving a small group of somewhat wealthy kids off on a summer adventure/vacation. Alif and her four friends are flying from Australia to Dubai, where they will join her father’s desert archeological dig as student interns. It is, Alif is certain, the summer where she will ‘‘rediscover’’ ...Read More

Children of Virtue and Vengeance, Tomi Adeyemi (Holt 978-1-25017-099-6, $19.99, 416pp, hc) December 2019.

Déjà vu wracks the reading experience in Children of Virtue and Vengeance, the second novel in Tomi Adeyemi’s wildly successful Legacy of Orïsha series. That’s because it’s basically the same story as Children of Blood and Bone: the characters must recover sacred artifacts, defeat a corrupt and fascist leader, and unite despite their ...Read More

Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Del Rey 978-0-5256-207-85, $27.00, 320pp, hc) July 2020.

Noemí Taboada is a flighty but intelligent young socialite in 1950 Mexico City. Perhaps she’s growing out of her capriciousness, though. She seems focused on a career in anthropology and is determined to live up to family duty and her father’s trust. Her recently married cousin Catalina has written Noemí’s father a distressing letter stating her husband ...Read More

Hella, David Gerrold (DAW 978-0-7564-1657-7, $26, 448pp, hardcover) June 2020

Somehow, with the publication of this novel, the twenty-three-year-old wunderkind who created The Trouble with Tribbles (1967) has entered into the fifty-third year of his career, a long, varied, and satisfying one. I myself am not quite sure how this transformation from newbie to Grand Old Man occurred in what sometimes seems, to a reader who was present at ...Read More

Kim Harrison, American Demon (Ace 978-0- 593-10141-4, $28.00, 473pp, hc) June 2020. Cover by Chris McGrath.

Rachel Morgan’s back in the Hollows for her 14th novel in the series, set before the happily-ever- after epilogue in the previous volume. She’s been outed as a demon and blamed for letting the demons free, the old church that was her home and office is unliveable, her living vampire housemate Ivy seems to ...Read More

Numerous upcoming conventions and literary events have been postponed or canceled as part of efforts to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus that causes respiratory illness COVID-19. The situation remains in flux as the full extent of the pandemic remains to be seen. We will update this story and our convention listing with further information about cancellations and postponements as it becomes available.

What if you held a book fair, but nobody came? The annual Frankfurt Book Fair is still scheduled for October 2020 (albeit at a smaller than usual scale), but Bloomsbury, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Lagardere Publishing, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and numerous smaller publishers have announced that they will not attend or exhibit, though many plan to take part in the fair’s virtual activities. Although Canada is the “guest of ...Read More

J.K. Rowling sparked controversy with remarks she made in June regarding trans people. In a tweet June 6, she tweeted about an article headlined “Creating a more equal post-Covid-19 world for people who menstruate,” saying, “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?” She went on to say, “If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, ...Read More

Unbecoming, Lesley Wheeler (Aqueduct 978-1-61976-167-4, $18.00, 236pp, tp) May 2020.

Lesley Wheeler is an accomplished poet and a named professor at Washington and Lee, so it probably shouldn’t be a surprise that her first novel is peppered with striking language (“She was already a ghost of linen and warm air”; kids “flock and wheel”) and shrewd portraits of some familiar denizens of academia. Wheeler’s major previous venture into fantasy, ...Read More

CoNZealand has announced on twitter that they plan to make online Hugo voting available by July 8, 2020 latest. To account for the delay, they are extending the voting deadline to July 22, 2020.

Mail and email ballots will also be accepted if they are received before the deadline, but voters are strongly encouraged to wait for the online voting system to open at this point. A fillable pdf has ...Read More

The Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP) announced the 2020 inductees to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame: short story writer Ted Chiang, Star Trek writer D.C. Fontana, the Star Wars movie series, and the Hugo Award-winning graphic novel Watchmen by Alan Moore, illustrated by Dave Gibbons. The inductees will be included in the SF&F Hall of Fame display later this year.

The Science Fiction Hall of Fame was ...Read More

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

Londonia, Kate A. Hardy (Tartarus Press 978-1-912586-19-6, £35.00, 405pp, hc) April 2020.

Kate A. Hardy’s London of 2072 in Londonia is divided into two worlds. In the Cincture (hyper-center of old London Town, also called the Egg), the elite live a more-than-comfortable, mostly frivolous life, protected from the harsh realities of dire post-apocalyptic weather and a hand-to-mouth existence. Londonia (also known as The Pan), where life is nasty, brutish, ...Read More

Writer Rudolfo Anaya, 82, died June 28, 2020 at home in Albuquerque NM after a long illness. Anaya was a major Chicano writer, best known for his debut Bless Me, Ultima (1972), adapted as a film in 2013. His work occasionally had genre elements, notably in his Sonny Baca mystery series: Zia Summer (1995), Rio Grande Fall (1996), Shaman Winter (1999), and Jemez Spring (2005). Mystery Curse of the ChupaCabra ...Read More

The Human, Neal Asher (Tor UK 978-1-509-86244-3, £18.99, 544pp, hc) April 2020. (Night Shade 978-1-950994-83-0, $26.99, 433 pp, hc) June 2020. Cover by Adam Burn.

I don’t know whether Neal Asher had figured out the nature of the ancient, alien, civilization-destroying Jain technology back when he introduced it in some of the early Polity-universe novels (The Line of Polity, Polity Agent), but he certainly has now. ...Read More

The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA) has opened submissions for the 11th Annual Imagining Indigenous Futurisms Award for “emerging authors who use science fiction to address issues of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination” until December 1, 2020.

Applicants must send a “200-word statement with background & goals in writing SF” and a “4,000-word maximum writing sample addressing Indigenous perspectives” to Professor Grace L. Dillon at dillong@pdx.edu. For ...Read More

The Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA) has announced the 2020 winners of its annual research awards:

John Joseph Adams has announced the relaunch of Fantasy magazine, with issue #61 scheduled for November 2020. Fantasy will be joining “sister-magazines Lightspeed and Nightmare under the same publishing umbrella”. Adams has named Christie Yant and Arley Sorg as co-editors-in-chief of Fantasy. From this point forward, all three magazines will be co-published by Adams and Yant under the name Adamant Press.

Fantasy Magazine’s format will differ slightly from its sister-magazines ...Read More

Pew, Catherine Lacey (Farrah, Straus, Giroux 978-0374230920, $26.00, 224pp, hc) May 2020.

Catherine Lacey first came to my attention with her 2017 novel The Answers, a quirky thought experiment about pain management, the biology of love, and a bizarre project into human relationships funded by an eccentric movie star. Her latest book, Pew, is about a stranger, with no name, no memory, and no identity, who drops ...Read More

The Bookseller announced recipients of the British Book Awards, honoring The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (Nan A. Talese; Chatto & Windus) for three related awards: Publicity Campaign of the Year, Agent of the Year, and Audiobook of the Year.

Also called the “Nibbies,” the British Book Awards “honours and celebrates the commercial successes of publishers, authors and bookshops.” The Testaments audiobook, narrated by Ann Dowd, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Mae ...Read More

Out of Body, Jeffrey Ford (Tor.com 978-1-250-25015, $14.99, 168pp, tp) May 2020.

Jeffrey Ford is consistently one of the most graceful writers we have, and when he decides to revisit some of the classic tropes of horror fiction – such as the haunted house in his recent The Twilight Pariah and “The Jew­eled Wren” – we can reliably expect a couple of things. For one, the clarity of the ...Read More

Nine Shiny Objects, Brian Castleberry (Custom House 978-0062984395, $27.99, 336pp, hardcover) June 2020

The Great Matter of UFOs, a topic which has intrigued the general public for over seventy years, has always resided at a strange tangential intersection with science fiction. Prior to the rash of strange aerial object sightings in 1947 that kickstarted what we know today as UFO-ology, science fiction of course had given us many stories ...Read More

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The Heart Is a Mirror for Sinners and Other Stories, Angela Slatter (PS Publishing 978-1-78636-563-7, £25.00, 331pp, hc) April 2020.

British and World Fantasy Award recipient Angela Slatter’s writing is elegant, elo­quent, evocative, and exquisitely disturb­ing; polished to the rich patina found only on the finest quality antique silver, it casts a spell on the reader. Luckily, the Australian author is nearly as prolific as she is talented. The ...Read More