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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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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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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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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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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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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Cory Doctorow: What Kind of Bubble is AI?

Of course AI is a bubble. It has all the hallmarks of a classic tech bubble. Pick up a rental car at SFO and drive in either direction on the 101 – north to San Francisco, south to Palo Alto – and every single billboard is advertising some kind of AI company. Every business plan has the word “AI” in it, even if the business itself has no AI in ...Read More

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A Ramble on How Short Stories Have Shaped my Chaotic Writing Career by Ai Jiang

I suppose, before diving in, to put it in short, short fiction has opened a tremendous num­ber of doors for me personally as a writer – craft-wise, career-wise, opportunity-wise. I don’t think the trajectory of my writing journey so far would have been as wildly fortunate and luck-filled – at least to me – without short stories.

In the summer of 2019, I met a man in a coffee shop ...Read More

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Spotlight on: Tobi Ogundiran, Author

TOBI OGUNDIRAN is the author of Jackal, Jackal, a collection of dark and fantastic tales. Ogundiran has been nominated for BSFA, Shirley Jack­son, Ignyte, and Nommo awards. His work has appeared in The Book of Witches and Africa Risen, and in several Year’s Best anthologies. His debut novella, In the Shadow of the Fall, is out from Tordotcom in 2024. Born and raised in Nigeria, he spent seven years in ...Read More

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The Stormy Age of SFF Magazines by Neil Clarke

When people proclaim that we’re experi­encing a ‘‘Golden Age’’ for short fiction, I tend to look at them sideways. While we’ve seen an explosion of new markets over the last two decades, it’s never been a particularly healthy time for the overwhelming majority of them. For print editions, increasing postal and printing costs are eating away at profits. Those publishing online struggle face steeper challenges and often have unpaid or ...Read More

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DIMENSIONS OF WONDER: George Saunders in a Haunted Mansion with Chocolate Mint by Eugenia Triantafyllou

Welcome to our special short fiction issue! We’ve got an interview with Carmen Maria Machado, best known for her National Book Award-nominated collection Her Body and Other Parties. We hosted a roundtable discussion with short story powerhouses Ted Chiang, Kelly Link, and Usman T. Malik – among them they’ve won seven Nebula Award, five Hugo Awards, four World Fantasy Awards, and a couple of Stoker Awards, too.

We’ve invited some ...Read More

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Ness Brown Guest Post

For most of human history, on clear nights our species could marvel at an untarnished view of nearly 3,000 stars. This view, shared by civilizations around the globe, was a wellspring of awe and speculation out of which flowed diverse myths and philosophies. Countless cultures have long traditions that connect stargazing with storytelling.  

In the centuries-old Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, Princess Kaguya is a native of the Moon. ...Read More

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Commentary by Cory Doctorow: Don’t Be Evil

It’s tempting to think of the Great Enshittening – in which all the inter­net services we enjoyed and came to rely upon became suddenly and irreversibly terrible – as the result of moral decay. That is, it’s tempting to think that the people who gave us the old, good internet did so because they were good people, and the people who enshittified it did so because they are shitty people. ...Read More

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Commentary by Cory Doctorow: Plausible Sentence Generators

I was surprised as anyone when I found myself accidentally using a large language model (that is, an “AI” chatbot) to write some prose for me. I was twice as surprised when I found myself impressed by what it wrote.

Last month, an airline stranded me overnight in New York City when my flight to LA was canceled due to an air traffic control snafu. The airline rep at the ...Read More

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Commentary by Cory Doctorow: SF Doesn‘t Predict, It Contests

On June 20, 2023, I will be awarded an Honourary Doctor of Laws from York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, in Toronto, Canada. The text below is the speech I will give.

Goodness me, it is a gigantic honour to be here today, and to be recog­nized in this way. I’m profoundly grateful to the faculty and administration here at York, and to my friends and family ...Read More

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Pim Wangtechawat Guest Post–“Time Travel”

It was a few months before Covid hit when the question first came to me: What would happen if one were to become addicted to travelling back in time?

I was living in Edinburgh, Scotland, and recently embarked on a Creative Writing master’s degree course. I was in a strange, reflective period in my life. I found myself constantly dissecting various aspects of who I was and pondering where they’d ...Read More

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Commentary: Cory Doctorow: The Swivel-Eyed Loons Have a Point

One of the more baffling events of the first quarter of 2023 was the mass protest in Oxford (England, not Mississippi) against the “15-minute city pledge,” a movement to get city councils to strive for cities where each neighborhood is a walkable place, with most amenities (groceries, schools, health care, employers, leisure activities) located within a pleasant 15-minute walk from your door.

The 15-minute city is an extremely inoffensive and ...Read More

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Commentary: Cory Doctorow: End to End

Within the very first year of operation, 1878, Bell’s company learned a sharp lesson about combining teenage boys and telephone switch­boards. Putting teenage boys in charge of the phone system brought swift and consistent disaster. Bell’s chief engineer described them as ‘Wild Indians.’ The boys were openly rude to customers. They talked back to subscribers, saucing off, uttering facetious remarks, and generally giving lip. The rascals took Saint Patrick’s Day ...Read More

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