Cheryl Morgan is an editor, reviewer and fan. She has won Hugo awards for Best Fanzine and Best Fan Writer. She currently runs Salon Futura, a critical magazine, SF Awards Watch, and the new SF&F Translation Awards, among other projects.
Like most genre readers, I started on books (and comics and TV) at a very early age. I have no idea what my first genre novel might have been. I ...Read More
Read more2010 was an unusually strong year for novel-length science fiction. I didn’t read every SF novel published during last year, which means I’ve certainly missed some excellent titles. But I read as widely as possible, and I was impressed by an awful lot of it. It seems to me that the membrane separating genre SF and mainstream ‘literary’ writing is more porous as it’s ever been—a thoroughly good thing, of
Straight from the Locus Online newsroom:
Karen Lord has been named the winner of the 2011 William L. Crawford Award for her first novel Redemption in Indigo (Small Beer Press). The award, presented annually at The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, is for a new fantasy writer whose first book appeared in the previous year. This year’s conference will be held March 16-20, 2010 in Orlando FL. ...Read More
Read moreScott Phillips’s Rut is nearly impossible to talk about without also talking about the mode of its publication. Concord Free Press’ publishing model defies all of our expectations about what a publishing house should do, which is, ultimately, make money for itself and its editors and investors. Instead, Concord Free Press eschews the concept of financial gain. The books come out in limited runs – only 3,000 copies of Rut
Karen Lord has been named the winner of the 2011 William L. Crawford Award for her first novel Redemption in Indigo (Small Beer Press). The award, presented annually at The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, is for a new fantasy writer whose first book appeared in the previous year. This year’s conference will be held March 16-20, 2010 in Orlando FL.
The award committee shortlisted Lauren Beukes’s ...Read More
Read moreIt would almost seem to be February, Valentine’s month, for all the stories about love. I give the award to the ones in Fantasy Magazine.
This ezine still seems to be giving us original fiction every
Shaun Tan’s animated short film The Lost Thing (Passion Pictures), directed by Shaun Tan and Andrew Ruhemann and based on Tan’s illustrated book of the same name, is one of five finalists for the Oscars in the Short Film (Animated) category. Comments Tan, who plans to attend the ceremony, “Time to finally get a tux perhaps.”
We asked Tan what it feels like to be a finalist: “Fantastic, amazing, and ...Read More
Read moreWelcome to our second Locus Roundtable discussion. I started off the panel with the following question:
Now that we’re a few weeks into the new decade, I was wondering if anyone would like to take a crack at talking about the decade just past. It was the decade that had Arthur C. Clarke’s iconic science fictional years: 2001 and 2010. But instead of commercial transport to the Moon and adventures ...Read More
Read moreThe Con or Bust auction, to raise funds for people of color to attend Wiscon and other SFnal conventions, is currently open for offers from people interested in donating items for auction, and is also accepting direct donations.
The auction will open for bidding February 21, 2011 at 12:01 a.m. EST and closes March 6, 2011 at 11:59 p.m. EST.
The Con or Bust auction is in its third year ...Read More
Read moreThe 2010 Edgar Award nominees were announced by the Mystery Writers of America. There are two fantasies in the YA category: 7 Souls by Barnabas Miller & Jordan Orlando (Delacorte) and Dust City by Robert Paul Weston (Razorbill). Expiration Date by Duane Swiercynski (Minotaur), a fantasy, has been nominated in the Best Paperback Original category.
2010 Grand Master Sara Paretsky is one of ours as well. For additional nominees in ...Read More
Read morePaul Graham Raven is a freelance web guy and the editor of Futurismic.
I was lucky to have parents who encouraged me as a reader right from the start – I was reading by myself before I went to kindergarten. They never once in my life criticised me for spending hours at a time with my nose in a book (although my other dreamy behaviour got some justifiable criticism), and ...Read More
Read moreMidnight Riot opens in modern police-procedural mode, with the discovery of a dead body and (six meters away) its missing head. Probationary Constable Peter Grant, the book’s young narrator, can only hope that someday he’ll be able to deal with that kind of case, instead of a newbie’s quiet beat or mounds of paperwork. At this point he doesn’t even believe in magic, let alone think that he could play
This is the first Locus Roundtable podcast! I was able to sit down with Peter Straub and Gary K. Wolfe online while they discussed topics such as: James Tiptree Jr., Peter’s stories, time travel, and David Foster Wallace. Also, Peter drops some tantalizing hints about where he’s going with his next novel.
[powerpress] ...Read More
Read moreJon Courtenay Grimwood is the author of the ‘post-cyberpunk’ Ashraf Bey trilogy and stand-alone novels such as BSFA award winning End of the World Blues. The Fallen Blade is the first book of his new Assassini trilogy.
I discovered SF through Asimov’s Foundation, and fell in love with it after finding a battered copy of Alexi Panshin’s Rites of Passage in a second hand shop. (I thought it ...Read More
Read moreThe new publishing year comes with an alteration of the schedules of some of the zines, which means an alteration of my reviewing schedule. Unfortunately, I still can’t always get publishers to send me stuff when I have time to read it. This mid-month report is accordingly short.
The good-story award this time goes to Subterranean; my favorite is the Laidlaw.
Jack Ketchum (a pseudonym for Dallas Mayr) has been voted Grand Master by the members of the 2011 World Horror Convention, to be held April 28 – May 1, 2011 in Austin TX. ...Read More
Read moreThe British Science Fiction Association has announced the finalists for the 2010 awards.
Novel:
Short Fiction
by Gary Westfahl
By one theory, a work of art should be judged primarily by how well it accomplishes its own goals. Thus, anyone would concede that a Three Stooges short does not offer viewers eloquent dialogue, beautifully framed shots, or thoughtful commentary on the human condition, suggesting that it completely lacks merit, yet such films never intended to offer any rewards of that kind; instead, they were designed to
Gary K. Wolfe is a senior reviewer at Locus Magazine. He is the award-winning author of non-fiction work The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction. He is a professor at Roosevelt University, and his most recent book is Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature.
He titled this piece: “Used Shoes”
The first science fiction novels I remember reading were Andre Norton’s Star Man’s Son (1952) ...Read More
Read moreFor any reader, there are always two histories of science fiction and fantasy (or of any other literature, for that matter). There is the formal evolutionary history that we critics and academics like to putter with, and there is our own personal history of what we read and when we read it, and which is frankly much more difficult to capture in a narrative that isn’t purely self-indulgent (as too
Adrienne Martini is a Locus reviewer and author of two non-fiction books, Hillbilly Gothic and Sweater Quest.
I’ve spent the last few years rereading all of the Heinlein titles I can get my hands on. I’ve also been shoving the idea around and trying to figure out why that book hit me in that way at that time. I might be getting closer.
Discovering Heinlein, for most who have, ...Read More
Read more
Neil Gaiman is the award-winning and bestselling author of American Gods, Anansi Boys, The Graveyard Book, and the comic series Sandman. He blogs at http://journal.neilgaiman.com.
ON DIGITAL PUBLISHING AND EBOOKS
Paper books are really, really useful things. They are wonderful things. I’m still convinced that the paperback
Author, bookseller, and collector Jerry Weist, 61, died January 7, 2011 after a long struggle with cancer.
Weist wrote the Hugo Award-nominated Ray Bradbury: An Illustrated Life (2002) and The 100 Greatest Comic Books (2004). He was an art expert with an emphasis on comic book, pulp, and science fiction art, and wrote two editions of The Comic Art Price Guide, with a third edition completed shortly before his ...Read More
Read morePaul Di Filippo has written hundreds of short stories and a handful of novels over the years. His most recent novel is Roadside Bodhisattva, and his most recent collection is Harsh Oases, both from PS Publishing. He can be found blogging at The Inferior 4 + 1.
What inveterate reader has not, at one time or another, dreamed of becoming a librarian? Those magical guardians of all things ...Read More
Read moreBest lists are strange and unwieldy beasts, especially for those of us with wide-ranging tastes and a healthy consumption rate for new books. And there’s something about the very concept of naming the “best” of the year that—like awards—brings out an instinctive need for fisticuffs and debate and “I can’t believe X didn’t make it.” Still, over the years I’ve found invaluable recommendations in just such places; the more idiosyncratic
As reported in Locus Online, Neil Barron passed away last year. While he wrote and edited many critical articles and reviews, he will perhaps be best remembered for Anatomy of Wonder, most recently in its fifth edition. Along with the remembrances that will appear in Locus Magazine, Gary K. Wolfe and Stefan Dziemianowicz sent in these appreciations. If you have any appreciations or memories of the man or his ...Read More
Read moreThe 2011 Reading List from the Reference and User Services Association was announced January 10, 2011 at the American Library Association midwinter meeting in San Diego. Categories of genre interest include:
Science Fiction
Short List:
Fantasy
Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker (Little, Brown) won the 2011 Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in young adult literature, announced January 10, 2011 at the American Library Association midwinter conference in San Diego.
Terry Pratchett received the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime contribution in writing for young adults.
Also of genre interest: the Odyssey Award for Excellence in Audiobook Production went to The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam ...Read More
Read moreSo I had an idea about a particular kind of story that gets told in space opera, and discovered Neil Gaiman had independently had the same idea, only three years earlier and talking about Doctor Who. It happens to the best of us, doesn’t it?
My version first: I was re-reading Dan Simmons’s Hyperion sequence, Hyperion (1989), The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Endymion (1996), and The Rise of Endymion (1997). ...Read More
Read more
Robert J. Sawyer was born in Ottawa, Canada. His family moved to Toronto when he was a baby, and he has lived there ever since.
Sawyer sold a few SF stories in the ’80s, beginning with ‘‘If I’m Here, Imagine Where They Sent My Luggage’’ for The Village Voice (1981), gradually transitioning to a career as a full-time SF writer in the early ’90s. Sawyer’s short fiction includes Aurora Award
