Locus Online

Patricia Briggs, Smoke Bitten (Ace 978-0-440-00155-3, $28.00, 342pp, hc) March 2020. Cover by Daniel Dos Santos.

A new foe with a really nasty bite and some creepy magic keeps Mercy busy trying protect friends and family. At the same time, she’s re­ally worried about her mate. Alpha werewolf Adam hasn’t really recovered emotionally from the last big battle, retreating inside himself so far he’s even shut down their mage bond. ...Read More

Finna, Nino Cipri (Tor.com 978-1-250-24573-1, $14.99, 138pp, tp) February 2020.

I suppose the giant retail emporium has served as a portal into shadowy realms at least since John Col­lier’s “Evening Primrose” almost eighty years ago, but the deliberately labyrinthine layout of IKEA stores seems almost designed for creepy stories – something that Nino Cipri enthusiastically takes advantage of in their novella Finna, which is partly a testy workplace ...Read More

Beyond the Outposts: Essays on SF and Fantasy 1955-1996, Algis Budrys (Ansible Editions/Lulu.com, 978-0-244-56705-7, $22.50, 378pp, trade paperback) 2020

The field of fantastika could never have reached its current flourishing condition, nor hope to continue forcefully, without the efforts of the small presses. These firms throughout the history of the genre and into the present have preserved many older works from oblivion and also offered homes to worthy living ...Read More

King of the Dogs, Queen of the Cats, James Patrick Kelly; Stefan Rudnicki, narrator (Skyboat Media 978-1-09413898-5, $12.22, digital download, 2.25 hr., unabridged) January 2020.

Veteran narrator Stefan Rudnicki’s deep, nasal, al­most lugubrious, voice (last appearing in this column in connection with Adam-Troy Castro’s short-story collection My Wife Hates Time Travel, and Other Stories) anchors the more absurd aspects of this no­vella, in which a circus serves as ...Read More

An Orc on the Wild Side, Tom Holt; Ray Sawyer, narrator (Hachette Audio 978-1-47898841-0, $24.98, digital download, 14 hr., unabridged) Sep­tember 2019.

Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City, K.J. Parker; Ray Sawyer, narrator (Ha­chette Audio 978-1-54915698-4, $24.98, digital download, 13.25 hr., unabridged) Decem­ber 2019.

In the late 1980s, I fell in love with Tom Holt’s first novel, Expecting Someone Taller, an amusing work that took the ...Read More

Fiyah Winter ’20 Beneath Ceaseless Skies 1/30/20, 2/13/20 Strange Horizons 2/3/20, 2/10/20 That We May Live: Speculative Chinese Fic­tion, Sarah Coolidge, ed. (Two Lines) March 2020.

The 13th issue of Fiyah is unthemed, letting the stories come unfettered and showcasing several very new authors. The lead is “All That the Storm Took” by Yah Yah Scholfield, a harrowing tale of surviving hurricane Katrina. The structure is ...Read More

Numerous authors, editors, and pub­lishers are offering free material for readers stuck in isolation, including several of genre interest.

J.K. Rowling, Bloomsbury, Audible, Overdrive, Pottermore, and Scholastic launched the “Harry Potter at Home” initiative, making the ebook and audiobook of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone free, and issuing a general read-aloud license for teachers so they can read from the book on video. There are also special activities for ...Read More

The Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth College has awarded the $5,000 2020 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award for Playwriting to Drive by Deborah Yarchun.

A second-place prize, with a $750 honorarium, was awarded to Override by Elizabeth Keel.

The Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards program was established in 2017 as an open competition to honor and support creative works around speculative fiction. The playwriting award is offered to ...Read More

The International Board on Books for Young People awarded the 2020 Hans Christian Anderson Award to author Jacqueline Woodson. Awarded biyearly, the Hans Christian Anderson Awards “recognize lifelong achievement and are given to an author and an illustrator whose complete works have made an important, lasting contribution to children’s literature.” Woodson’s work of genre interest includes Harbor Me (2018) and “The Other Half of Me” in Tomorrowland: Ten Stories about ...Read More

Romance Writers of America is retiring its RITA Awards and introducing a new award called The Vivian. Named after RWA founder Vivian Stephens, the new award “recognizes excellence in romance writing and showcases author talent and creativity. We celebrate the power of the romance genre with its central message of hope–because happily ever afters are for everyone.” A task force will present a proposed format for the Vivian at the ...Read More

The Visual History of Science Fiction Fan­dom, Volume One: The 1930s, David Ritter & Daniel Ritter (First Fandom Experience 978-1-7332964-4-1, $150.00, 516pp, hc) Febru­ary 2020.

Fandom may be a billion-dollar industry these days, and the field of fandom studies has drawn enough scholarly attention that it even has its own academic journal, so old-time SF fans might be excused a degree of smugness while claiming – not unreason­ably – ...Read More

The British Book Awards, or Nibbies, will hold a virtual awards ceremony on June 29, 2020. The original award ceremony, planned for May 18, 2020, was postponed due to disruption caused by the COVID-19 outbreak.

While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and would like to keep the ...Read More

Ghost Species, James Bradley (Hamish Hamilton 978-1-926-42866-6, AU$29.99, 320pp, tp), April 2020.

Back in February, Jeff Bezos earmarked ten bil­lion dollars for the establishment of the “Earth Fund.” He joins fellow billionaire philanthropists Michael Bloomberg and Bill and Melinda Gates in throwing large sums of money at the climate crisis. While it’s questionable whether these acts of rich-people tokenism will play any role in sav­ing the planet, James Bradley, ...Read More

The shortlist for the 2020 Encore Award, given by the Royal Society of Literature to the best second novel of the year, includes one title of genre interest. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the award, each of the four shortlisted authors will receive a £500 prize.

The judges for 2020 are Edmund Gordon, Nikita Lalwani, and Eley Williams. The winner of ...Read More

B. Sharise Moore won a $5,000 grant, one of several given to artists and writers around the world by the Sustainable Arts Foundation. Her debut novel, YA historical fantasy Dr. Marvellus Djinn’s Odd Scholars, is forthcoming from MVmedia.

For more information, including the list of finalists and recipients, see the Sustainable Arts Foundation website.

While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or ...Read More

Larissa Lai, author of The Tiger Flu (Arsenal Pulp), won the $5,000 Jim Duggins Mid-Career Novelist prize, for “LGBTQ-identified authors who have published multiple novels, built a strong reputation and following, and show promise to continue publishing high quality work for years to come.” Judges were Brian Leung and Shani Mootoo.

For more information, see the official announcement.

While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus ...Read More

John Joseph Adams will step down as editor of Nightmare magazine after issue #100 in January 2021, with with author and editor Wendy N. Wagner taking over. Adams will remain editor of Lightspeed and publisher of both magazines.

Adams said:

If you’re a diligent Nightmare reader, you’re already familiar with her editorial contributions: She was the guest editor for our Queers Destroy Horror! special issue back in 2015. But in ...Read More

Paladin’s Grace, T. Kingfisher (Red Wombat Studio, $5.99, 400pp, eb) February 2020.

T. Kingfisher (the pseudonym that Hugo Award winning Ursula Vernon uses when writing for adults) works in a similar setting as K.J. Parker. Her world, like his, is full of commoners and princes and courtiers and tradespeople in an imagined pre-industrial past. Where Parker goes heavy on the engineering (with a little bit of hu­mor), Vernon goes ...Read More

Chinese SF writer Ye Yonglie, 79, died May 15, 2020 in Shanghai. He published over 50 books, including SF, children’s books, mysteries, and popular science. He was often called the “Chinese Isaac Asimov” for his prolific output of fiction and non-fiction.

Ye Yonglie was born August 30, 1940 in Wenzhou, China. He began writing from a young age, with his first poem published at age 11, and attended Beijing University, ...Read More

The Odyssey Writing Workshop has announced recipients of several of its scholarships available for students attending in 2020.

Scott Gray won the Miskatonic Scholarship, funded by George R.R. Martin and covering full tuition and housing for a promising new writer of Lovecraftian cosmic horror.

Vikram Ramakrishnan won the Walter & Kattie Metcalf Singing Spider Scholarship, funded by Pam Metcalf Harrington, covering full tuition for “a fantasy writer whose novel excerpt ...Read More

The New York Public Library announced its five Young Lions Fiction Award finalists for 2020, which includes Bryan Washington’s Lot (Atlantic). The winner will be announced June 11, 2020. The $10,000 prize is awarded “each spring to a writer age 35 or younger for a novel or a collection of short stories” by a panel of judges. 2019’s winner was Ling Ma’s Severance (Farrar, Straus, Giroux). For more information, including ...Read More

Bryan Washington’s Lot (Atlantic) is the winner of the 2020 International Dylan Thomas Prize, announced May 14. Inland by Téa Obreht (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) had also made the shortlist.

The Gravity of Us, Phil Stamper (Bloomsbury 978-1547600144, $17.99, 307pp, hc) February 2020.

Set just slightly in the future, as the US trains astronauts for a mission to Mars, The Gravity of Us is a smart, heartwarming, and thoroughly relevant novel about teens swept up in the clashing ambitions of those around them. It brims with joy and drama, with a dose of treachery tossed in to keep the ...Read More

Finalists for the 2020 Premio Kelvin 505 Awards, presented by the Celsius 232 festival and honoring “the best science fiction, fantasy or horror novels published in 2019” for the first time in Spain have been announced.

Mejor Novela Original (Best Original Novel)

Winners have been announced for the 2020 Prix Imaginales, for “the best fantasy novels, and everything particularly fantasy, published the previous calendar year” in France.

Illustration

• François Baranger for illustrations in Les Montagnes hallucinées 1 by H.P. Lovecraft