Moses Ose Utomi: Unreal Element

MOSES OSE UTOMI was born July 26, 1988 in San Bernardino CA and grew up in Las Vegas NV. He studied psychology as an undergrad, then attended Sarah Lawrence College, where he earned a MFA in creative writing. Utomi is also a lifelong martial artist.

He began publishing work of SF interest with “The Story of a Young Woman” (2018, as Ose Utomi). His short work also includes the Forever ...Read More

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Spotlight on Anne Perry of Arcadia

You’re the publishing director for the SF/F imprint at Quercus in the UK (formerly known as Jo Fletcher Books). We understand you’re relaunching with a new vision and name. Tell us about it.

I was very lucky when I started at Quercus; Jo Fletcher Books was 11 years old and well-established, and had a reputation for being particularly strong in epic fantasy, having launched authors like Sebastien de Castell, Peter ...Read More

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SF in Brazil

Latin American SF in The New York Times

Emily Hart’s piece ‘‘Science Fiction from Latin America, With Zombie Dissidents and Aliens in the Amazon’’ was published in The New York Times on July 10, 2023, and claimed the attention of the Brazilian SF community. Hart writes out of Colombia, and deals in her piece with that country and with Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, and Brazil. Her starting point ...Read More

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Shelley Parker-Chan: All the Others

SHELLEY PARKER-CHAN was born in New Zealand and is of Malaysian-Chinese heritage. They studied engineering and anthropology, and did graduate work on war crimes and restorative justice. Parker-Chan was an international development advisor on issues of human rights, gender equality, and LGBTQ+ rights in Southeast Asia, and worked extensively in several countries in Asia. They now live in Melbourne, Australia.

Debut She Who Became the Sun appeared in 2021, launching ...Read More

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Spotlight on Manzi Jackson

Manzi Jackson is a contemporary visual Artist based in Kigali, Rwanda.

He dabbles in surrealist and magi­cal concepts, displayed in his ability to portray the full magical breadth of his subjects with breathtaking, colorful technique.

He’s currently focusing on a body of portrait and figurative works depicting dreamy energy that draws us into a rich and vibrant realm.

His use of flower-draped muses in astronaut suits are characterized in a ...Read More

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Cory Doctorow: Capitalists Hate Capitalism

In conflict, we find clarity.

We all hold contradictory views: We love our families, but they drive us crazy. We want more housing in our cities, but we don’t want our property values to decrease with expanded supply. We want better schools, but we recoil from a 0.1% municipal levy to fund them.

It’s normal to hold contradictory views, but when those views come into conflict, how we act shows ...Read More

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The Year in Review 2023 by Charles Payseur

2023 was certainly… a year for short speculative fiction. Another amazing year in terms of the quality and quantity of stories pub­lished, but also a challeng­ing year as many venues have faced increased fi­nancial pressures and de­creasing returns from social media, as well as personal losses and national and international tragedies. While the year might seem like it went out like a lamb, it’s possible that the full impact from ...Read More

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The Year in Review 2023 by Graham Sleight

I’m always reluctant to pick out trends when sum­marising a year’s books for Locus. There are too many contingencies at play in what gets published when, and so much is dependent on which fraction of the torrent of SFF books I’ve managed to read. But this year, I do feel confident in one judgment: It was a really fine time to be reading books of the fantastic. The works I’m ...Read More

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The Year in Review 2023 by Russell Letson

Long Games, Nightmares, and Retrospectives by Russell Letson

I look into the tea leaves – well, the coffee grounds – at the bottom of the year’s cup and find no wisdom or insight into either the state of the field or even my own reading patterns. As usual. Nevertheless, I am more than content with where my nose-following and stumbling around in the dark have taken me in 2023, across ...Read More

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The Year in Review 2023 by Niall Harrison

Every once in a while, in defiance of all the cacoph­ony of the actual world, the federated genres of the fantastic can still produce a work whose single novum speaks with a clarity that demands attention. Such a work is Sin Blaché and Hel­en Macdonald’s Prophet, a highly readable technothriller-romance with two screenplay-ready protagonists, elevated by their investigation into the titular substance. Prophet causes people to experience an irresist­ible ...Read More

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The Year in Review 2023 by Jake Casella Brookins

2023 wound up being a strange reading year for me. I started the year with a big move: from Chicago back to beautiful Buffalo, NY. While it’s wonderful to be back east and closer to the mountains, being so far from Chicago’s amazing literary scene has been hard. I’ve particularly missed the wonderful speculative book clubs I was part of there – Think Galactic and the Chicago Nerd Social Club ...Read More

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The Year in Review 2023 by Archita Mittra

Once upon a time, bad things happened and even­tually, things got better. While this might be true for certain stories, real life, plagued by ongoing pandemics and genocides, rarely offers such neat con­clusions. Perhaps that is why we repeatedly turn to art – not only to find escape and solace, but also, wisdom, empathy, and more urgently so, the will to resist and survive, despite the odds. And as the ...Read More

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The Year in Review 2023 by Arley Sorg

2023 was a bummer: We published our final issue of Fantasy Magazine in October. All the same, it was a wonderful issue, and a strong way to go out. But there was no shortage of excellent short fiction to be found elsewhere. Be­sides the many intriguing magazines regularly putting out stories, there was a wealth of books that folks who love short fiction should consider picking up.

My caveat: These ...Read More

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The Year in Review 2023 by Alexandra Pierce

2023 by Alexandra Pierce

2023 was a really good year for books! I’m going to focus on the books I loved that were written by women and nonbinary folk.

SEQUELS

It was a pretty good year for sequels. I would be a paid-up member of the Murderbot fanclub if one existed (let me know if I’ve missed that memo), so Martha Wells’s System Collapse was a welcome end-of-year ad­dition to ...Read More

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The Year in Review 2023 by Liz Bourke

Looking Back on 2023 by Liz Bourke

If there’s a theme that unites the books I enjoyed reading most this year, it’s power, vio­lence, and survival. The dam­age that violence inflicts on those who suffer it, and those who wield it, and the ambigui­ties and challenges inherent in the ethical uses of power.

Of course, some of them were also just plain fun.

Three books stand out most. One is ...Read More

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The Year in Review 2023 by Alex Brown

2023 by Alex Brown

In an unintentional yet perfect synchronicity of events, I’m writing this 2023 speculative fiction wrap-up on the last day of the year with a glass of Martinelli’s while waiting for the ball to drop. It was a strange, contradictory year, one with several professional wins and sev­eral more personal hardships. Going through my reading log, I got through more books this year than I thought I ...Read More

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2023 Hugo, Lodestar, and Astounding Voting

Chengdu Worldcon, the 81st World Science Fiction Convention, received 1,674 valid ballots, down from 2,235 at Chicon 8. There were 1,847 valid nominating ballots (1,843 electronic, four paper), up from 1,368.

Nomination statistics weren’t released until the very last of the 90 days allowed, just before our deadline. They don’t include author names for nominees, and generally don’t offer explanations for why several items were dropped as “not eligible.” To ...Read More

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The Year in Review 2023 by A.C. Wise

The Year in Review 2023 by A.C. Wise

It’s been an odd year for me, reading-wise. I served as a World Fantasy Award judge, which was a won­derful experience, but meant a large portion of my year was devoted to works originally published in 2022. As a result, I feel – even more than I normally do – like I missed out on tons of fantastic work published in 2023, ...Read More

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The Year in Review 2023 by Ian Mond

2023 in Review: Best. (Reading). Year. Ever.

I’ve remarked on the book-lag I experienced since the COVID lockdown, which saw my reading drop off a steep cliff. In 2023, I’ve felt more like my book-loving self, reading close to 90 books (compared to 60 last year). It helps that this has been an extraordinary year for fiction, the best I’ve experienced since penning reviews for Locus. I’m aware recency bias ...Read More

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The Year in Review 2023 by Colleen Mondor

2023 in Review by Colleen Mondor

There is a bit of a haunted story in my paternal fam­ily history that has preoc­cupied me since my father first shared hints of it when I was a teenager. We were talking about his father, my Pepere, who was born in Quebec and emigrated at the age of 13, with his family, to Rhode Island. I heard a few brief anecdotes over the ...Read More

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Martha Wells: System Rebuild

MARTHA SUSAN WELLS was born September 1, 1964 in Fort Worth TX. She attended Texas A&M University, graduating with a BA in anthropology. She lives in College Station TX with her husband.

Her debut fantasy novel The Element of Fire (1993) began the Ile-Rien series, which includes The Death of the Necromancer (1998) and the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy The Wizard Hunters (2003), The Ships of Air (2004), and The ...Read More

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The Year in Review 2023 by Paul Kincaid

One of Those Years

It has been one of those years that come along ir­regularly in which, wherever we look, we come upon liter­ary treasures.

No fans of the short story, for instance, should com­plain about a year in which we have been gifted with new collections by Kate Atkinson and Steven Millhauser. Both writers, incidentally, who should be far better known among readers of the fantastic. Kate Atkinson’s first ...Read More

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Howard Waldrop Fishing by Dave Myers

When Howard taught at Clarion West, he’d tell students that they would only learn to write by writing, a lesson he also applied to fishing. We ended his first stint with two days of fly fishing on the nearby Cedar and Snoqualmie Rivers. Howard later wrote he had found Oz, prompting him in 1995 to move to the Oso General Store on the North Fork of the Stillaguamish, about an ...Read More

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The Year in Review 2023 by Gary K. Wolfe

One of my favorite open­ings of any novel is that of Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, in which he describes navi­gating a bookstore filled with Books You Haven’t Read, including “Books You Needn’t Read”, “Books Read Even Before You Open Them Because They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written”, “Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read ...Read More

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Spotlight on Winona Nelson

Artist/writer Winona Nelson was born in 1983 and grew up in Duluth MN. She has drawn all her life and began painting digitally as a teenager. She studied classical real­ism and art for the entertainment industry at the Safehouse Atelier in San Francisco.

Winona is a queer, Two Spirit Indigenous per­son, and her fine art often focuses on the stories and history of her tribe, the Ojibwe of Minnesota, and ...Read More

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A. Y. Chao Guest Post–“Sparking Joy”

In Shanghai Immortal I wanted to create a fantasy world that was fresh and cosy-nostalgic—the way Stars Hollows is for Gilmore Girls—but thoroughly irreverent and Asian. 1935 Shanghai as a setting was modern enough to be familiar, its glitz and glamour balanced by a dark underbelly of colonialism, racism, and mounting Japanese Imperial aggression, while being traditional enough to still have a firm grasp on the past. Much of ...Read More

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Ai Jiang: Where the Ghosts Live

AI JIANG was born June 18, 1997 in Fujian, China, and emigrated to Canada with her family at age four. She attended the University of Toronto, the Humber School for Writers, and the Gotham Writers’ Workshop, and earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Edinburgh in 2022.

She began publishing work of genre interest with “Hello’’ (2021) in The Dark, and more than 35 stories have since ...Read More

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Andrea Stewart: After the Rebellion

Andrea G. Stewart was born August 3, 1982 in Vancouver, Canada, and grew up in various places in the US.

Stewart began publishing work of genre interest with “Dreameater” (2013), a quarterly winner in the Writers of the Future competi­tion. She has published more than a dozen other stories in anthologies and magazines.

Her first novel, urban fantasy Loose Changeling, ap­peared in 2014 under the name A.G. Stewart, and was ...Read More

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Spotlight on: The Sunday Morning Transport

Tell us about your project. When was it founded, and who’s involved in run­ning it?

The Sunday Morning Transport was founded in August 2021, and we published our first story in January 2023. Julian Yap is editor in chief, Fran Wilde is managing editor, and our copyediting, proofreading, and social media team is Kaitlin Severini (our copyeditor), Ryan T. Jenkins (copy­edits and proofing), Delia Davis (year one proof­reader) and Christine ...Read More

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Robert J. Sawyer: A Cryonic Murder

Robert James Sawyer was born April 29, 1960 in Ottawa, Canada. His fam­ily moved to Toronto when he was a baby, and he has lived there ever since. He earned a bachelor’s in radio and televi­sion arts (broadcasting) from Ryerson Poly­technic University, Toronto in 1982. After graduating, he briefly worked at SF spe­cialty store Bakka-Phoenix Books before spending most of the ‘80s as a freelance non-fiction writer, doing journalism for ...Read More

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Things Short Stories Did and Didn’t Teach Me About Writing and Selling Novels by José Pablo Iriarte

When I give presentations to aspiring writers – particularly presentations on writing and selling short stories – I’m always careful to emphasize that short stories are no longer the apprenticeship into the novel world that they once were. I know plenty of folks who have sold science fiction and fantasy novels without ever having bothered with shorts.

That said, short fiction did kind of func­tion as a proving and learning ...Read More

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