Winners of the 2021 Academy of British Cover Design (ABCD) Awards have been announced. A Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker, designed by Jack Smyth (Head of Zeus) and The Queen of Nothing by Holly Black, designed by Nick Stearn (Hot Key) won the Sci-Fi/Fantasy category. Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. by Joyce Carol Oates, designed by Jamie Keenan and photographed by Jeff Cottenden (Fourth Estate) won the ...Read More
Flash Fire, TJ Klune (Tor Teen 978-1250203687,$18.99, 384pp, hc) July 2021.
Before I write anything about Flash Fire, T.J. Klune’s sequel to The Extraordinaries, I need to warn that this will be a spoiler-laden review. It’s frankly impossible to write it any other way as everything in the first book so directly impacts the second. So, go read The Extraordinaries and then come back here for my ...Read More
Fantasy 5/21, 6/21 Nightmare 5/21, 6/21 The Dark 5/21, 6/21
Fantasy #67 is the strongest issue yet in its new incarnation. “Like Birdsong, the Memory of Your Touch” by Izzy Wasserstein packs a great deal into 700 words, including a near-future scenario in which nature triumphs over humankind and a relationship ends. P.H. Low‘s “Disenchantment” is bittersweet. A girl is born with a hole in ...Read More
Spirits Abroad, Zen Cho (Small Beer 978-1-618-73186-9, $17.00, 352pp, tp), August 2021.[Expanded from the 2015 edition.]
Before Zen Cho earned well-deserved popularity for her revisionist Regency-era fantasies Sorcerer to the Crown and The True Queen, she received the 2015 Crawford Award for her collection Spirits Abroad, from the Malaysian publisher Fixi Novo. It seems fair to say that not a lot of international readers got hold of ...Read More
Lightspeed 6/21 Omenana 4/21 Strange Horizons 6/21/21 Tor.com 6/9/21, 6/16/21, 6/23/21
June’s Lightspeed features some interesting scenarios in both the science fiction and fantasy sections. Timothy Mudie‘s “Different People” imagines that an unmarried man is contacted by the woman who was his wife in the parallel universe she had to flee from. She finds him and they start a relationship; when she starts to dive back into ...Read More
Strange Beasts of China, Yan Ge (Tilted Axis 978-1911284444, £9.99, 220pp, tp) November 2020. (Melville House 978-1-612-19909-2, $25.99, 240pp, hc) August 2021.
As an author, Yan Ge’s remarkable career began when, as a teenager, she won a national short-story contest in China. She was quickly picked up by a publisher and released her first collection at the age of 17. By the time Yan Ge moved with her husband ...Read More
Star Eater, Kerstin Hall (Tordotcom 978-1-250-62531-1, $26.99, 440pp, hc) June 2021. Cover by Sam Weber.
Kerstin Hall’s novella, The Border Keeper, came out in 2019 to no small acclaim and at least one award nomination. Star Eater demonstrates that the promise of The Border Keeper wasn’t a flash in the pan. This is an exquisitely gripping novel with a bloody, unflinching heart. And yet, for all the intricate ...Read More
A new 20-minute opera, Stars Between, with a libretto by SF writer E. Lily Yu and music by Steven K. Tran, is now available on the Seattle Opera website. The opera tells the story of the Voyager space probes, following them “into the interstellar unknown, exploring death, beauty, wonder, space, and time.”
The opera was created as part of the inaugural year of the Jane Lang Davis Creation Lab: ...Read More
The winners of the 2021 National Fantasy Fan Federation Speculative Fiction Awards (the Neffys) have been announced on Facebook.
Best Novel (tie)
Younger Readers (tie)
Best Book Editor
Best Pro Artist
Best Non-N3F Fanzine
Author RON WEIGHELL, 70, died December 24, 2020, a few weeks after suffering a stroke. Born 1950, Weighell began publishing genre fiction in 1986, with stories appearing in magazines and anthologies, including year’s best volumes. Most of his work was supernatural horror, and his major inspirations include M.R. James and Arthur Machen. Some of his short fiction is collected in The Greater Arcana (1994), The White Road (1997), The ...Read More
The FIYAHCON 2021 committee has announced the winners for the 2021 Ignyte Awards, which “seek to celebrate the vibrancy and diversity of the current and future landscapes of science fiction, fantasy, and horror by recognizing incredible feats in storytelling and outstanding efforts toward inclusivity of the genre.” Winners were presented at an online ceremony on September 18, 2021.
Best Novel — Adult
In the Watchful City , S. Qiouyi Lu (Tor.com 978-1250792983, 192pp, $14.99) August 2021.
Close as I can discern, S. Qiouyi Lu began their career circa 2016, with a story in Strange Horizons titled “Her Sacred Spirit Soars.” (Although their CV does list a poem from one year earlier, “Particularities.”) In either case, the succeeding short span of years have been filled with a respectable number of tales from their ...Read More
Remainders of the American Century: Post-Apocalyptic Novels in the Age of U.S. Decline, Brent Ryan Bellamy (Wesleyan University Press 978-0819580313, $24.95, 256pp, pb) June 2021.
In this fascinating study of primarily US post-apocalyptic fiction from the end of WWII through the 2007-8 financial crisis, Brent Ryan Bellamy engages with “the fields of American studies, science fiction studies, and print culture studies” to unpack how these narratives have changed over ...Read More
The Speculative Literature Foundation (SLF) is accepting applications for its $1,000 Working Class Writers Grant, “awarded annually to assist working class, blue-collar, poor, and homeless writers who have been historically underrepresented in speculative fiction, due to financial barriers.” Applications are open until September 30, 2021. The winner will be announced November 15, 2021.
For more information, see the SLF website.
While you are here, please take a moment to support ...Read More
The National Book Awards Fiction 10-title longlist has been announced, including works of genre interest:
There were 415 books submitted for the 2021 Fiction category. The judges are Alan Michael Parker, Emily Pullen, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, Luis Alberto Urrea (chair), and Charles Yu.
Five finalists will be announced October 5, 2021, and winners on November 17, ...Read More
This Poison Heart, Kalynn Bayron (Bloomsbury 978-1547603909, 384pp, $18.99, hc) June 2021.
Briseis Greene has a thing for plants. Literally. Ever since she was little, Bri has had the inexplicable ability to make plants grow. Plants react to her emotions and often bend toward her as if she were a walking, talking ray of sunshine. Her adoptive mothers, Thandie and Angie, don’t quite know what to do with her. ...Read More
The National Book Awards Translated Literature 10-title longlist has been announced, including works of genre interest:
Jack Four, Neal Asher (Tor UK 978-1529049978, £20.00, 448pp, hc) June 2021. Cover by Steve Stone.
One of Neal Asher’s specialties is monsters (though not of the cute sort), and the new Polity novel, Jack Four, is all monsters, all the time. It starts with brutal mercenaries and their alien customers and works its way up through nearly indestructible mutated alien warriors and their transformed sort-of-human shock troops, ...Read More
Beowulf: A New Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley (FSG) is the winner of the $1,000 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, which recognizes “a published translation of poetry from any language into English that shows literary excellence.” The 2021 judge was Indran Amirthanayagam.
For more information, see the official website.
While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on reader ...Read More
Fix, Grist‘s “solutions lab,” has announced three winners for their Imagine 2200 Short Story Contest. The contest aimed “to envision a clean, just future… [and] create stories of life in that future.” The theme was “Climate fiction for future ancestors.” Winners are:
Other finalists were:
Hatfield House in Philadelphia PA has announced a new exhibit by Afrofuturist group Black Quantum Futurism. The exhibit “Ancestors returning again / this time only to themselves” was created by Rasheeda Phillips and Camae Ayewa, with nods to artists who influenced Afrofuturism, including Octavia E. Butler and Sun Ra. It includes the debut of video and sound installation Write No History:
Write No History features found and archival footage ...Read More
Time has named author N.K. Jemisin as one of the 100 most influential people of 2021 in the “Artists” category. Jemisin is the award-winning author of The City We Became, the Broken Earth trilogy, the Inheritance Trilogy, and more.
For the full list and more details, see the Time article.
While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely ...Read More
The Horror Writers Association (HWA) announced the recipients of its 2021 scholarships and diversity grants.
Eugen M. Bacon, Jonathan Kincade, Tonya Liburd, Somto Ihezue Onyedikachi, and Juan Manuel Pérez are winners of the $500 Diversity Grants, given to “underrepresented, diverse people who have an interest in the horror writing genre, including, but not limited to writers, editors, reviewers, and library workers.”
Shannon DeAnne Lawrence won the $2,500 Horror Writers Association ...Read More
The National Book Awards Young People’s Literature 10-title longlist has been announced, including titles of genre interest:
The judges ...Read More
The Ladies of Horror Fiction (LOHF) have announced the winners of their annual Writers Grant:
Each will receive $100. The grants are “inclusive to all women who have reasonably demonstrated a commitment
The Coming Storm, Regina M. Hansen (Atheneum 978-1-5344-8244-9, $17.99, 272pp, hc) June 2021. Cover by Tran Nguyen.
Regina Hansen’s darkly charming novel, The Coming Storm, is a historic fantasy heavily steeped in folklore and place. Set in 1949 among the Scottish-Canadian community of Prince Edward Island, it tells a story of mythological monsters and music that calls to mind stories like Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks, ...Read More
The Omega Sci-Fi Awards have announced the creation of the Feminist Futures Award. The Feminist Futures Award will be co-presented by Artemis Journal, and “will be awarded to a distinct winner for an outstanding feminist sci-fi story.”
This award recognizes a science fiction story that embraces feminist themes. Top entries will exemplify excellence in feminist storytelling. We encourage stories that capture the complexities and other aspects of identity, as well ...Read More
