DAVID BALDACCI published his first novel, Absolute Power, in 1996. The feature film adaptation followed, with Clint Eastwood as its director and star. Baldacci has published 37 novels for adults; all have been national and international bestsellers, and several have been adapted for film and television. His novels are published in over 45 languages and in more than 80 countries, with over 130 million worldwide sales. Baldacci has also ...Read More
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Your life, whether you know it or not, has been shaped by crisis points. They come in all shapes and sizes, from personal life decisions—whether to divorce, who you choose to trust in a dangerous situation, what seat you pick when you purchase tickets on a flight you didn’t know would crash—to geopolitical events with staggering consequences. You can also think of crisis points as pivot points, a moment or ...Read More
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Sarah Beth Durst was born Sarah Beth Angelini on May 23, 1974, in Northboro MA. She attended Princeton University, graduating in 1996 with a degree in English with a concentration in theater and dance. She lived in England with her husband-to-be for a year, then returned to Massachusetts, and eventually settled in Stony Brook NY.
Durst writes fantasy for adults, young adults, and children. Her debut novel, middle-grade Into ...Read More
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My name is Taran Matharu, and I am the New York Times bestselling author of the Summoner series, a high fantasy saga that has sold over a million copies.
The Chosen (Contender #1) is my first foray into science fiction, combining my passion for history, palaeontology, unsolved mysteries and outer space. Here’s the blurb:
Throughout history, people have vanished with no explanation. A group of teenagers are about to discover ...Read More
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The 17th Indian Science Fiction Conference was held December 15-16, 2018 at Benaras Hindu University, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India. The conference was organized by the Indian Association for Science Fiction Studies in Bangalore in collaboration with Indian Science Writers Association, Ayodhya and MCIIE, IIT, Benaras at Indian Institute of Technology.
The theme of the conference was “Technology and Science Fiction”. Presentations dealt with myth and technology in the post-colonial era, ...Read More
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JASPER FFORDE was born January 11, 1961 in London. After graduating from Dartington Hall School, he worked in the film industry as a focus puller and cinematographer for nearly 20 years before becoming a novelist. His bestselling novels are “a joyful blend of Comedy-SF-thriller-Crime-Satire,” and his fans gather every May in Swindon, England for the annual “Fforde Ffiesta” celebrating his work.
Debut novel The Eyre Affair, a comic fantasy ...Read More
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In the shadow of several years of climate chaos, from devastating hurricanes and unforeseen droughts to migrant crises, climate fiction is experiencing a surge of popularity in speculative and other literature. There is an emerging global consciousness that climate change is present and urgent, and that it affects all of us even if its impacts vary wildly depending on who and where you are.
Climate fiction often depicts people who ...Read More
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I recently finished the first draft of a long-overdue fantasy novel called The Broken Heavens, last in a trilogy. Instead of celebrating, however, I found myself filled with post-post weariness. Endings are bittersweet, and this one was especially so. While I began writing this series in earnest about ten years ago, the kernel of its idea – a world where the invaders were alternate versions of the protagonists – ...Read More
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Episode 24a: In conversation with Nathan Ballingrud: “The Good Husband”
In a follow up to our previous podcast, we had the very great pleasure of chatting with the lovely Nathan Ballingrud, author of “The Good Husband”, about the themes and inspiration for his story about a marriage gone awry, and his new works (both film and text) in 2019. Best to read “The Good Husband” first or, if you must ...Read More
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Episode 24: Transformative Horror: “The Fruit of My Woman” by Han Kang (translated by Deborah Smith) and “The Good Husband” by Nathan Ballingrud
Ballingrud’s work is frightening, Kang’s is surreal, and both are disturbingly beautiful in their portrayal of how a person’s radical transformation can destabilize their marriage… or are they about how marriage can precipitate a radical transformation? Tune in to hear us tease out the nuances of these ...Read More
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As a child, I was first exposed to life in the West through Chinese translations of American science fiction. While I couldn’t see E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (because back then Hollywood films weren’t shown in China), I did get to read the Chinese translation of Kotzwinkle’s novelization. To this day, I have fond memories of the nigh-incomprehensible footnote explaining Dungeons & Dragons to the reader—just try imagining accomplishing this feat in ...Read More
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I owe a lot to Doctor Who, but not my enduring affection for the time travel story. In my formative years, the Time Lords had grounded the Doctor, the Tardis confined to a corner of the laboratory while an endless parade of monsters kept trying to invade or blow up nineteen-seventies Earth.
What did it for me—what opened my mind to the imaginative possibilities of time travel ...Read More
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SHANNON CHAKRABORTY was born December 7, 1985 in New Jersey. She studied international relations and Middle Eastern history at American University before moving to Brooklyn to work in a medical office. While working in healthcare, she joined the Brooklyn Speculative Fictions Writers group and began developing her craft with early stories set in the world that would become the Daevabad trilogy, an epic political fantasy inspired by medieval Islamic history. ...Read More
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“Writing a novel is as if you are going off on a journey across a valley. The valley is full of mist, but you can see the top of a tree here and the top of another tree over there. And with any luck you can see the other side of the valley. But you cannot see down into the mist. Nevertheless, you head for the first tree.” ...Read More
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As usual, I mostly read short horror fiction, but among the novels I read I found several good ones to recommend: Unbury Carol by Josh Malerman (Del Rey) is a weird, deeply dark western about the eponymous woman, who has suffered from a condition since childhood – she periodically falls into a deep coma-like state during which she appears dead. Only a few people know, and one – her husband ...Read More
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As ever, the exercise of trying to infer grand themes from a year’s books (or, more exactly, a year’s reading) is a bit of a lottery. If nothing else, writing and publishing lead-times mean that very few books were a direct verdict on the year in which they were published. But I’d note two themes that struck me. Firstly, it felt like a year when there were more than the ...Read More
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Calendar year 2018 was dominated by the overwhelming success of the movie Black Panther, which drew a whole new audience to cinemas in cities like Nairobi and Lagos. It inspired a sugar-rush of love, a hastily retitled Nollywood rip off, and a small mini-backlash from those who rewrote Wakanda’s history to make it more credibly African. Elsewhere in film, the Nigerian short Hello Rain, adapted by CJ Obasi ...Read More
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LEIGH BARDUGO was born April 6, 1975 in Jerusalem, Israel, and grew up in Southern California. She attended Yale University, graduating with an English degree in 1997, and worked various jobs, including as a copywriter, journalist, and make-up and special effects artist.
Her debut YA novel Shadow and Bone, an epic fantasy, appeared in 2012, and began the Shadow and Bone trilogy that continued with Siege and Storm (2013) ...Read More
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“The Old Man and C” by Sheila Finch (1989) has been adapted as a
stage play by Jason Trucco & David Jager, with a musical score by Carlos
Alomar, and debuted in “semi-public” performances on February 10-13,
2019 in New York.
This story and more like it in the March 2019 issue of Locus.
While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or ...Read More
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Howdy, listeners! It’s been another year when audiobooks seem ever more robust as a medium, plus another year of the interminable online argument about whether listening to the audiobook has equal weight with reading the book (hint: yes, yes it does).
But, as is my wont at this time of year, I’m using this space to discuss the listening time I spent being unfaithful to audiobooks, and talk about the ...Read More
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At the beginning of 2018 I had no idea that I would end up reading so much short fiction from so many different venues that I would need a spreadsheet to keep track of it. Since I started reviewing online short fiction for Locus in the August issue (after the sad passing of Gardner Dozois – I very much wish I could read his 2018 year-end column this year) I’ve ...Read More
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These days I don’t read much horror other than short fiction. It’s not what I turn to for pleasure-reading fiction. So my “year-in-review” article does not specifically discuss the dark side. Maybe not surprisingly, though, many of my favorite reads have more than a thin stream of the tenebrous trickling through them. Outside of personal inclination, this may be an indication of what seems to be becoming more of a ...Read More
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In 1660, John Locke published his Two Treatises of Government, where he set out to resolve the seeming conflict between individual property rights (which he valorized) and the Bible (ditto), which set out the principle that God had created the Earth and its bounty for all of humanity. How could a Christian claim to own something personally when God had intended for everyone to share in His creation?
Locke’s ...Read More
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There wasn’t much that really blew me away in 2018, but some entertaining titles turned up. At the top of my SF reading this year are Martha Wells’s Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, and Exit Strategy, the last three novellas in the Murderbot Diaries quartet featuring the deadly yet oddly endearing android Murderbot, a corporate-owned security guard that apparently once went berserk and killed humans (hence its chosen ...Read More
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Sadly, what sticks most with me about 2018 is how many greats we lost. Two SFWA Grand Masters, and two more who very plausibly could have been named Grand Masters.
On January 22, the incomparable Ursula K. Le Guin died. She was perhaps the best writer in our field, and was plausibly mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. On March 8, we lost Kate Wilhelm, who ...Read More
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Nothing in 2018 can possibly compare to the breadth of imagination, range of tone, and unconventional spelling present in Donald Trump’s tweets. His early morning tantrums proved to be the most riveting, most extraordinary, most majestic fiction I read this year. It says something about authors around the world that when faced with Trump’s prodigious talent they never dropped their heads; they continued to write and publish the most astonishing ...Read More
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It’s been a hard year. The rule of ignorance and selfishness in Trump’s America; the wilful destruction of economic probity at the behest of perceived (and probably illusory) political necessity in Brexit Britain; the continued rise of the far right in Hungary, Poland, Italy, France, and elsewhere. All of this is, at some point, going to feed through into a wave of fictions built around the ongoing sense of fear ...Read More
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By the time the clock hits 11:59 on December 31, my list of books read for 2018 will tally about 150. Because I review a wide variety of books, a small minority of those books will have been SF/F (only about a dozen, in fact). I like reading and reviewing genre books, and I especially like doing so for Locus, but it’s just a sliver of what I do ...Read More
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The New York Review of Science Fiction hosted a party to celebrate the 75th birthday of author Rick Bowes, attended by various New York-area SF luminaries. Ellen Datlow and Jeffrey Ford both read appreciations of Bowes, praising him as a friend, writer, storyteller, mentor, conversationalist, and living history of some of the most interesting times in New York City.
This story and more like it in the February 2019 issue ...Read More
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Novels first, then: Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World is the novel of 2018. With his previous two books, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock and A Head Full of Ghosts, Tremblay announced himself as among the most ambitious of his generation of horror writers, producing novels that drew on the examples of the genre’s great practitioners, King and Jackson, while blending them with a 21st- century ...Read More
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It’s the most summarizing time of the year, and I’ve been at it long enough that I’m tempted to just summarize my old summaries, looking for meta-trends or shapes in the clouds (very like a camel, indeed) that impose order on the squirming facts of a field that is neither singular nor unified but (to plagiarize myself from a quarter-century ago) “a set of fields with readerships that only occasionally ...Read More
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We are mixing it up a little this year. The following sections are sorted by Hugo Eligibility: Professional, Semiprozine, etc., and by the SFWA qualifying standard for pay rate, then sorted loosely by pay rate and amount of fiction published. We covered 70 magazines, 14 audio sites, and nine critical magazines.
The short fiction market held strong through 2018, with more new voices, more inclusivity, and more translations than we’ve ...Read More
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