KAT HOWARD is now represented by Allie Levick of Writers House.
V.E. SCHWAB‘s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (Tor) won the Bisexual Book Award in the Speculative Fiction category, presented by the Bi Writers Association.
DAVID DIOP‘s At Night All Blood Is Black (Pushkin), translated by ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS, won the 2021 International Booker Prize. The £50,000 prize is divided equally among the author and ...Read More
The Album of Dr. Moreau, Daryl Gregory (Tordotcom 978-1250782106, $14.99, 176pp, tp) May 2021. Cover by Christine Foltzer.
Already in the public domain for years, H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau has practically spawned a microgenre all its own, with Brian Aldiss, Gwyneth Jones (as Ann Halam), Gene Wolfe, Theodora Goss, the Simpsons, and even Marlon Brando having a whack at the story or its characters and themes. ...Read More
Apex #123 Nightmare 4/21 Black Static 78-79
Apex #123 presents six original stories. Technology allows the protagonist of “This Is the Moment, Or One of Them” by Mari Ness to review and “shift,” if she desires, some of her memories of a relationship. That’s a far too simplistic description of a story with both subtle nuance and profound consideration of life choices. Just read it. “Throw Rug ...Read More
Subdivision, J. Robert Lennon (Graywolf Press 978-1-64445-048-2, $16.00, 240pp, tp) April 2021.
If my column has a mission statement, it’s to shine a light on literary or translated works with speculative elements that rarely get recognised or discussed within the genre. J. Robert Lennon is an example of the former, a literary author whose fiction has increasingly gravitated toward the fantastic but who is likely to be unfamiliar to ...Read More
Broken Fevers, Tenea D. Johnson (Rosarium 978-1732638853, $14.95, 272pp, tp) March 2021.
Tenea D. Johnson’s Broken Fevers is a wildly imaginative short story collection that tackles some important topics with style and delivers a healthy heaping of meaning in each narrative, regardless of length. A solid mix of genres, this collection pulls readers into short stories that do a lot more than just entertain.
Johnson sets the atmosphere in ...Read More
Strange Horizons 3/29/21, 4/21 Clarkesworld 4/21
At the end of March Strange Horizons published a special issue featuring Palestinian speculative fiction. It includes art, poetry, four stories, and an introductory essay, and features creators from across the Palestinian diaspora. “Wills” by Wadih Haddad is very short and very Weird, starting with a man in a sort of consumer hypnotic state coming awake with the statement “I want,” then ...Read More
The Impossible Resurrection of Grief, Octavia Cade (Stelliform Press 978-1-777091767, $14.99, 82pp, tp) May 2021.
Octavia Cade is a writer new to me, even though since 2016 she’s won three Sir Julius Vogel Awards, the national SF awards of New Zealand, and has published a fair amount of short fiction in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. Her new novella, The Impossible Resurrection of Grief, comes to us ...Read More
Agent Ginger Clark has left her position as vice president at Curtis Brown to found her own agency, Ginger Clark Literary. She is joined by Nicole Eisenbraun (also formerly of Curtis Brown), as agent and translation rights manager.
Clark began her career as an agent at Writers House, and joined Curtis Brown in 2005. She represents Richard Kadrey, Tim Pratt, Patricia C. Wrede, and the estate of Ursula K. Le ...Read More
The 2021 Colorado Authors’ Hall of Fame inductees list includes SF writers Kevin J. Anderson and W. Michael Gear in the Living category, and Robert Heinlein in the Legacy category.
A nonprofit founded in 2014, the Authors’ Hall of Fame is “dedicated to recognizing and preserving the history about the accomplishments of past and present authors who have created and published books.”
For the full list of inductees, see the ...Read More
The North Carolina Speculative Fiction Foundation (NCSFF) has announced the winner for the 2021 Manly Wade Wellman Award. The award recognizes “outstanding achievement in science fiction and fantasy novels written by North Carolina authors.”
President Barack Obama announced his 2021 Summer Reading List via Twitter, including a few works of genre interest:
For the complete list, see his post on Twitter.
While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on ...Read More
Winners for the 2021 Imadjinn Awards have been announced, including several categories of genre interest:
Best Science Fiction Novel
Best Fantasy Novel
StokerCon, sponsored by the Horror Writers Association (HWA), was held May 20-23, 2021, on the virtual Hopin platform. Guests of honor were Maurice Broaddus, Joe R. Lansdale, Seanan McGuire, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Lisa Morton, and Steve Rasnic Tem. Carol J. Clover, Jewelle Gomez, and Marge Simon received Lifetime Achievement Awards. Co-chair Brian Matthews said, “After a year of COVID-related isolation, we strived to bring people back together, to make them feel ...Read More
Artist Paul Alexander, 83, died June 14, 2021 at the Brethren Retirement Community in Greenville OH.
Paul R. Alexander was born September 3, 1937, in Richmond IN, the son of the late Fred and Ora Olive Alexander. After graduation from Wittenberg University in 1959, and then the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, he found work in the art field with architectural firms, and then moved into advertising, ...Read More
The Libertarian Futurist Society (LFS) has announced the winner for the Prometheus Award in the Best Novel category, honoring pro-freedom works published in 2020.
Winners of the 2020 Aurealis Awards, for the best in Australian speculative fiction, were announced in an online ceremony.
Best Science Fiction Novel (tie)
Finalists for the 2021 Eugie Foster Memorial Award for Short Fiction have been announced:
The winner will receive a plaque ...Read More
Winners of the Heinlein Society’s annual undergraduate scholarships for the 2020-2021 academic year were announced July 7, 2021. This year’s winners are Mandisa Keswa, Alexandra Ouimet, and LeAnn Rhodes. The scholarship awards $2,500 to each recipient. Winners were selected from a record 383 applications, including 23 international submissions.
Keswa received the Virginia Heinlein Memorial Scholarship, which is dedicated to female candidates majoring in engineering, math, or science. Ouimet received the ...Read More
Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf 978-0-59331-817-1, $28.00, 320pp, hc) March 2021.
Over the last couple of years, it’s been surprising to see literary authors of the calibre of Jeanette Winterson and Ian McEwan, with their respective novels Frankissstein (which I reviewed in 2019) and Machines Like Me, raise concerns about machine consciousness. Compared to climate change, pandemics, or the fallout from late-stage capitalism, the robot-apocalypse is ...Read More
Joy Williams will receive the 2021 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction “for a lifetime of outstanding work.” Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden said,
I am pleased and honored to confer this prize on Joy Williams, in celebration of her almost half-century of extraordinary work. Her work reveals the strange and unsettling grace just beneath the surface of our lives. In a story, a moment, a single sentence, it ...Read More
Submissions for the Speculative Literature Foundation’s (SLF) Diverse Writers Grant and Diverse Worlds Grant are open now through July 31, 2021. Each $500 grant “is intended to support the SLF’s mission of promoting literary quality in speculative fiction” and are awarded by SLF staff on the basis of merit.
The Diverse Writers Grant “is intended to support writers of speculative fiction who are from underrepresented and underprivileged groups, such as ...Read More
Finalists for the 2021 Science Fiction and Fantasy Rosetta Awards (SFFRA), for best translated work, have been announced:
Long-form
Soulstar, C.L. Polk (Tordotcom 978-1-250-20357-1, $17.99, 302pp, tp) February 2021. Cover by Will Staehle.
Soulstar is the conclusion to Polk’s Kingston trilogy, a cycle of books that each take politics and romantic and familial relationships as their focus. In Witchmark, it was Miles Hensley and his mysterious lover Tristan, and a series of deaths connected with an unjust war; in Stormsong, Miles’s sister Grace (and her romantic ...Read More
The finalists for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for the best short science fiction story have been announced by the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction. The award is normally presented during the annual Campbell Conference Awards, but will instead be announced online later this summer.
The International Association of Media Tie-in Writers (IAMTW) announced the winners for the 2021 Scribe Awards, honoring excellence in licensed tie-in writing. Winners and nominees of genre interest follow.
Original Novel — Speculative
Later, Stephen King (Hard Case Crime 978-1-78909-649-1, $14.95, 272pp, tp) March 2021. Cover by Paul Mann.
Later, Stephen King’s latest, is a horror story – something the narrator reminds readers of from time to time – but it’s one dressed up like a thriller with supernatural elements, and it has all the working parts of a pulpy crime novel. King has been known to walk the interstitial ...Read More
Dave Eggers’s upcoming novel The Every (McSweeney’s), sequel to The Circle, is being published on October 5, 2021 as a hardcover exclusively available from indie bookshops and the publisher’s website. Eggers explained the decision, in an email to Publishers Lunch: “I don’t like bullies. Amazon has been kicking sand in the face of independent bookstores for decades now.” Trade paperback and ebook editions published by Vintage will follow on ...Read More
