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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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The Fire in the Dark: Roundtable with Ted Chiang, Kelly Link, and Usman T. Malik

 

Locus recently hosted a virtual roundable discussion with leading SF/F writers Ted Chiang, Kelly Link, and Usman T. Malik, who sat down for a wide-ranging and lively conversation about the art, craft, and business of short fiction, and the impact of the form on their creative work and lives. Excerpt from the roundtable follows.

TED CHIANG is the author of collections Sto­ries of Your Life and Others and Exhala­tion ...Read More

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Carmen Maria Machado: Core of Darkness

CARMEN MARIA MACHADO was born July 3, 1986 in Allentown PA. She studied at American University in Washington DC, graduating with a degree in photography in 2008. She attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, graduating with her MFA in 2012, the same year she attended the Clarion Workshop. Machado has received fellowships and residencies from the Speculative Literature Foundation, Yaddo, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and other programs. She was ...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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Spotlight on The Best of World SF

Lavie Tidhar was born and raised on a kib­butz in Israel. He has traveled extensively since he was a teenager, living in South Africa, the UK, Laos, and the small island nation of Vanuatu.

Tidhar advocates bringing international SF to a wider audience, and has edited The Apex Book of World SF (2009), The Apex Book of World SF 2 (2012), and The Apex Book of World SF 3 ...Read More

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Justina Ireland: Art Isn’t Safe

JUSTINA IRELAND was born in French Camp CA, and grew up in San Bernadino and outside Sacramento. After graduating high school, she joined the Army, got married, and later settled in Pennsylvania with her husband before eventually moving to Maryland.

Her first novel, Vengeance Bound, a YA fantasy about a girl with a psychic link to the Furies, appeared in 2013, followed by YA fantasy Promise of Shadows (2014). ...Read More

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John Scalzi: Real People, Ridiculous Situations

JOHN MICHAEL SCALZI II was born May 10, 1969, and grew up in Southern California, going to school in Claremont. He graduated from the Webb School in 1987 and attended the University of Chicago, where he became editor-in-chief of the Chicago Maroon and graduated with a philosophy degree in 1991. He moved back to California, where he became the film critic and later a columnist for the Fresno Bee. In ...Read More

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Spotlight on Lauren Raye Snow

Lauren Raye Snow is an award-winning artist and illustrator from San Antonio, Texas, whose work explores uncanny, ambivalent visions, both dreadful and cathartic. She has art directed four Nebula Conferences, painted queer saints and monsters, and most recently has been nominated for a World Fantasy Award. Her work has been featured in Apex Magazine, Mermaids Monthly, New Gothic Review, and Infected By Art – but the really juicy stuff is ...Read More

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John Wiswell: Monstrous Humor

JOHN CORCORAN WISWELL was born Sep­tember 4, 1981, and grew up around the Mount Kisco area of New York State. He attended Bennington Col­lege, graduating in 2005, and went to the Viable Paradise writing workshop in 2013. Wiswell has multiple disabilities, including a neuromuscular syndrome, and often ex­plores disability issues in his fiction.

His first SF story, “Alligators by Twitter”, appeared in 2010, and he has since published around 40 ...Read More

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Wole Talabi: Nightmare Gods & Beyond

OLUWOLE TALABI was born February, 28, 1986 in a steel town on the out­skirts of Warri, a city in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria, and grew up there and in Benin City before his family settled in Lagos. He currently lives in Malaysia, where he works as an engineer, but ex­pects to relocate to Australia in the future.

Talabi’s first SF story was “The Human Thing” (2011), and his ...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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Anna-Marie & Elliott McLemore: No Borders

ANNA-MARIE MCLEMORE & ELLIOTT MCLEMORE are married co-authors of Venom & Vow (2023).

Anna-Marie is a queer, Latine, nonbinary author who grew up in Southern California. Their debut YA The Weight of Feathers appeared in 2015, and other books include Otherwise Award winner When the Moon Was Ours (2016), Wild Beauty (2017), Blanca & Roja (2018), Dark and Deepest Red (2020), Miss Meteor (2020, with Tehlor Kay Mejia), The Mirror ...Read More

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Karen Lord: First Contact

KAREN LORD was born May 22, 1968 in Barbados. She attended secondary school at Queen’s College, and later attended the University of Toronto. She earned a master’s degree in science and technology policy at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, and got her doctorate in the sociology of religion at Bangor University in Wales. She has traveled widely, taught physics in school, trained soldiers, and worked in the foreign service. She lives ...Read More

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Spotlight on: Yume Kitasei

Yume Kitasei is a debut writer of speculative fiction. She is half-Japanese and half-American and grew up in a space between two cultures—the same space where her stories reside. Her stories have appeared in publications including New England Review, Catapult, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Baltimore Review. Visit her online at yumekitasei.com.

Tell us about your new novel, The Deep Sky — the world where it takes place, and the characters who ...Read More

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Kemi Ashing-Giwa: Assassins & Megafauna

KEMI ASHING-GIWA WAS BORN August 22, 2000 in Southern California. She attended Har­vard University, where she stud­ied integrative biology and as­trophysics, and is now a PhD student at Stanford University.

She began publishing short fiction with “Paper Suns” in Anathema in 2021, and in 2022 published two stories at Tor.com, “Fruiting Bodies” and “The Suf­ficient Loss Protocol,” followed by “The Puppetmaster” in 2023. SF horror novella This World Is Not ...Read More

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Ann Leckie: Gods, Words & Models

 

ANN LECKIE was born March 2, 1966 in Toledo OH and grew up in St. Louis MO. She attended Washington University, graduating with a degree in music. She has worked as a wait­ress, a receptionist, a rodman on a land-surveying crew, and a recording engineer.

Leckie attended Clarion West in 2005, where she wrote her first pub­lished SF story “Hesperia and Glory” (2006). Over a dozen stories have appeared ...Read More

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2023 Locus Awards Winners

The Locus Science Fiction Foundation announced the winners in each category of the 2023 Locus Awards on June 24, 2023, during the Locus Awards Weekend. Maggie Tokuda-Hall MCed the awards ceremony with Connie Willis as special guest. Additional weekend events included readings and panels with leading authors.

SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL

  • WINNER: The Kaiju Preservation Society, John Scalzi (Tor; Tor UK)
  • Sweep of Stars, Maurice Broaddus (Tor)
  • The Red
...Read More Read more

Emma Törzs: Explaining Things to Myself

EMMA TÖRZS was born January 8, 1987 and grew up in Cambridge and Acton MA. After graduating college, she worked briefly in retail and restaurants before joining the MFA program at the University of Montana in Missoula, graduating in 2012. She attended the Clarion West writing workshop in 2017. In addition to writing fiction, she is also a translator, and teaches at Ma­calester College. She has lived in Minneapolis MN ...Read More

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Connie Willis: Roswell Redux

CONSTANCE ELAINE TRIMMER WILLIS was born December 31, 1945 in Denver CO and has lived in Colorado most of her life. She earned a BA in English and elementary education from the University of Northern Colorado, Greeley, in 1967, and taught el­ementary and junior high school from 1967-81. She made her first SF sale to Worlds of Fantasy with “The Secret of Santa Titicaca” (1971), and earned her first Hugo ...Read More

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Spotlight on Eli John

Eli John is an illustrator working from a studio in the Pendle Forest, Witch Country, UK. This melancholy landscape is a worthy setting as John works predominantly within the horror genre, inspired by supernatural and weird fiction, ghost stories and gothic literature, creating dark visions of sublime beauty and unsettling psy­chological landscapes. He has worked for renowned publisher’s worldwide, illustrating work by authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, M.R. James, ...Read More

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Spotlight on Ed Binkley

Ed Binkley has created fantasy artwork for three decades. He received the First Place Grand Prize in Infected by Art Volume 10 as well as the Body of Work award. His work is published in numerous issues of Spectrum: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art where he won Gold and Silver awards, and he was a finalist in the Beautiful Bizarre Art Award competition in 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022. ...Read More

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C.L. Clark: Hope and Tragedy

CHERAE LICHELLE CLARK was born August 10, 1990 in Oklaho­ma and grew up in Kansas City KS. She attended interna­tional school just outside London, England, then attended the University of Kansas as an undergrad. She earned her MFA at the University of Indiana, and was a 2012 Lambda Literary Fel­low under Dorothy Allison. Clark has worked as an English teacher, editor, and personal trainer. She lives in the UK.

Clark ...Read More

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