Locus Online

The Sunken Land Begins to Rise, M. John Harrison (Gollancz 978-0575096356, 272pp, hardcover) June 2020

One does not merely read a novel by M. John Harrison; rather, one inhabits it. Or perhaps the uncanny novel inhabits the lucky reader. For the duration of the reader’s immersion in the text (or the immersion of the text in the reader), his or her consciousness is erased and supplanted with Harrison’s elaborate ...Read More

The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water, Zen Cho (Tor.com 978-1-250-26925-6, $19.99, 160pp, hc) June 2020. Cover by Sija Hong.

After decades of movies, games, manga, and TV, it might well be that contemporary audiences are more familiar with the conventions of wuxia than with the classic American Western – not that there isn’t a fair amount of overlap. The crucial opening scene of Zen Cho’s The ...Read More

Interlibrary Loan, Gene Wolfe (Tor 978-1-250-24236-5, $25.99, 308pp, hc) June 2020.

There was already something of a valedictory tone about Gene Wolfe’s 2015 novel A Borrowed Man, which portrayed a glum, diminished future in which authors survive as helpless ”reclones” who could be checked out of libraries like books (or cubes or disks) – but who could casually be incinerated if they aren’t checked out frequently enough. In ...Read More

The Fantastic Fiction of Hannes Bok, Hannes Bok (American Fantasy Press 978-0990784678, $45, 448pp, hardcover) March 2020

As a kid, I used to confuse the artwork of Hannes Bok and Boris Artzybasheff. There’s a surface similarity, but when examined closer, Bok’s paintings and drawings exude a kind of Art Deco romance that Artzybasheff’s more cold and clever and satirical drawings never did. We can tell that one man was ...Read More

Honeybones, Georgina Bruce (TTA Press 978- 1-9163629-1-8, £7.00, 90pp, tp) May 2020.

Honeybones, the sixth in TTA Press’s novella series, deals with ugly subjects in beautifully written prose. Georgina Bruce immediately plunges the reader into young teen Anna Carew’s befuddled mind and places us in a ”house of mirrors… entangled with its selves, a pattern looping inwards, up stairs and through doorways and round corners…” haunted by ”endless ...Read More

By Force Alone, Lavie Tidhar (Head of Zeus 978-1838931278, £18.99, 516pp, hc) March 2020. (Tor 978-1-250-75345-8, $27.99, 416pp, hc) June 2020.

Sometimes while reading a Lavie Tidhar novel, there comes a point when you feel like he’s grabbed the wheel, grinning as he drives you aggressively into oncoming traffic and somehow pulls off moves that by all rights ought to be fatal. That’s never been more the case than ...Read More

Winners for the 2020 Sir Julius Vogel Awards have been announced by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Association of New Zealand (SFFANZ).

Winners of the 1945 Retro Hugo Awards, honoring work from 1944, have been announced by CoNZealand, the 78th Worldcon.

A digital copy of Aurealis #132, the All-New Zealand issue, will be sent free to anyone who emails <editor@aurealis.com.au> with the subject line “Aurealis #132 All-New Zealand” during CoNZealand, July 29 – August 2, 2020.

While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and would like to keep ...Read More

Several awards for services to SF fandom were presented during the CoNZealand opening ceremonies, held online July 28, 2020.

While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring ...Read More

CoNZealand Fringe, “a project of many genre fiction fan communities” which is “not endorsed by CoNZealand,” has created “a complementary programming series to the annual science fiction convention Worldcon,” accessible on their website and free to watch on YouTube.

Programming events will livestream on YouTube from July 28 – August 2nd (PDT) at “European-friendly times.” Panelists include Jeannette Ng, Gareth L. Powell, DongWong Song, Alasdair Stuart, Bogi Takács, and many ...Read More

Winners for the 2019 Ladies of Horror Fiction Awards have been announced:

The 13-title longlist for the 2020 Booker Prize has been announced, including several titles and authors of possible genre interest:

The preliminary ballot for the 2020 Ditmar Awards for Australian SF has been announced:

A group of SF professionals and fans, led by Anna Smith Spark, have written the following open letter to the World Science Fiction Society and Worldcon 2020 chair Norman Cates:

Dear WSFS Board members, and dear Norman,

As writers, publishers and readers of science fiction and fantasy, we are writing to express our concern that Saudi Arabia has been accepted as a potential host site for the 2022 World Science ...Read More

A Fall in Autumn by Michael G. Williams (Falstaff) won the 2020 Manly Wade Wellman Award, announced by the North Carolina Speculative Fiction Foundation (NCSFF) on July 27, 2020. The award recognizes “outstanding achievement in science fiction and fantasy novels written by North Carolina authors.” Other nominees were

The 2020 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards were announced at Comic-Con@Home online on July 26, 2020. Winners of SF/F interest include:

The World Fantasy Awards ballot for works published in 2019 has been announced. The awards will be presented during the virtual World Fantasy 2020 (WFC) convention, scheduled for October 29 – November 1, 2020.

The Life Achievement Awards, presented annually to individuals who have demonstrated outstanding service to the fantasy field, will go to Karen Joy Fowler and Rowena Morrill.

The World Fantasy Awards finalists are:

Best Novel

Rick Raphael (1919-1994) is the winner of the 2020 Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, intended to bring attention to lesser-known SF and fantasy authors. The jury particularly cites Raphael’s 1966 fixup novel Code Three (composed of three shorter works, including two Hugo Award finalists) and 1960 humor novella “Make Mine Homogenized”.

This year’s judges were Barry Malzberg and Robert J. Sawyer.

For more information about the award, see the Cordwainer Smith ...Read More

The 2019 Aurealis Awards winners, recognizing the best in Australian speculative fiction, have been announced.

The Eleventh Gate, Nancy Kress (Baen 978-9821-2458-8, $16.00, 344pp, hc) May 2020. Cover by Bob Eggleton.

Ideological, familial, and generational tensions have figured prominently in Nancy Kress’s stories as far back as the Beggars sequence of the 1990s, and now in The Eleventh Gate they become major plot drivers. The new novel combines elements of space opera with quasi-dystopian political conflict and intrigue among a collection of extrasolar colonies. ...Read More

Uncanny 3-4/20 Black Static 3-4/20 Nightmare 3/20, 4/20, 5/20 The Dark 3/20, 4/20

Let’s start with Uncanny #33. Alix E. Harrow‘s ”The Sycamore and the Sybil” is flat-out marvelous. It has the immutabily of myth, the magic of lore, and the power of modern wonder. The narrator is a sycamore who was once a woman (if you know about Daphne, you’ll have no problem accepting that) who ...Read More

Dawn Frederick, owner of St. Paul MN-based agency Red Sofa Literary, is at the center of an ongoing controversy. On May 28, 2020, during protests following the death of George Floyd in the Twin Cities, Frederick tweeted, “The gas station at the END OF MY BLOCK is officially getting looted. Calling the police right now to let them know as someone will need to board up this place.” (Her Twitter ...Read More

Network Effect, Martha Wells (Tor.com Publishing 978-1-25022-986-1, $26.99, 352pp, hc) May 2020. Cover by Jaime Jones.

Martha Wells has been writing excellent books since 1993, when Tor Books published her The Element of Fire. The Element of Fire, in its revised 2006 version and Wells’s The Wheel of the Infinite (2000) would feature in a list of my 100 favourite books of all time, so it may ...Read More

Made to Order, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Solaris) March 2020. Anthropocene Rag, Alex Irvine (Tor.com Publishing) March 2020.

I don’t think there can be any doubt that the best currently working original anthologist of science fiction is Jonathan Strahan. (Ellen Datlow probably retains that title for fantasy and certainly for horror.) Strahan’s new anthology is Made to Order, on the subject of robots and mostly their desire for ...Read More

DisCon III, the 79th World Science Fiction Convention, to be held August 25-29, 2021 in Washington DC, has announced John Harris as artist guest of honor, join­ing author guest of honor Nancy Kress, editor guest of honor Toni Weisskopf, fan guest of honor Ben Yalow, and special guests Malka Older and Sheree Renée Thomas. For more: <www.discon3.org>.

While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a ...Read More