Thistlefoot, GennaRose Nethercott (Anchor 978-0-59346-883-8, $28.00, 448pp, hc) September 2022.
Baba Yaga’s chicken-footed house has been delivered to her descendants, estranged siblings living in the United States some three generations removed from their maternal ancestor. The siblings have no idea who their progenitrix was, why this house has come to them, or even really what to do with it; and they definitely don’t know that with the house they ...Read More
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Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White (Peachtree) and Wake the Bones by Elizabeth Kilcoyne (Wednesday) are among the five finalists for the William C. Morris YA Debut Award, given by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) to “a previously unpublished author, or authors, who have made a strong literary debut in writing for young adult readers.”
The winner will be announced at ALA’s Midwinter Youth Media Awards ...Read More
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Amazon has notified magazine publishers that they will be ending their Kindle Publishing for Periodicals Program in September 2023, which means subscribers will no longer be able to receive their print or digital magazines through the site.
Publishers Weekly reported that they “learned that [Amazon] is ending its print textbook rental program, which was established about a decade ago, and will phase out print and digital magazine and newspaper subscriptions ...Read More
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As noticed last week and reported here, the USA Today bestseller list is on hiatus at least through the end of the year. And Publishers Weekly has skipped updating its lists this week (as it does a couple times a year).
Dream Foundry, a “non-profit dedicated to bolstering the careers of nascent professionals working with the speculative arts,” has announced winners for its 2022 contests.
Writing Contest
Finalists
Art Contest
Finalists
JULIE ELIZABETH STARINK was born April 11, 1955 in Exeter, Ontario, and lived with her family on the air force base in Centralia. She attended the University of Waterloo, where she studied biology and met future husband Roger Czerneda, married in 1976. She did her graduate studies at the University of Saskatchewan, researching fish and the evolution of reproductive communication systems, and also attended Queen’s University. After that, she ...Read More
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GigaNotoSaurus 9/22 Fantasy 10/22 Lightspeed 10/22
GigaNotoSaurus featured a story about magic maps and desperate opera composers in September’s “A Conspiracy of Cartographers” by Barbara A. Barnett. Said desperate opera composer is Guillaume who, after his latest work was panned by critics, seeks a short cut to success with the help of a map that will bring him to his greatest work. It’s a hasty and foolish ...Read More
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Cold Water, Dave Hutchinson (Solaris 978-1786187222, trade paperback, 464pp, $16.99) November 2022.
Having completed his marvelous main sequence of Fractured Europe books with a fourth installment, Europe at Dawn, in 2018 (you can read my review of three-quarters of the series here), Hutchinson now offers a pendant volume, starring a new lead. But the tale is in no way overly reliant upon, inferior to, or less fully developed ...Read More
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A Girl’s Guide to Love & Magic, Debbie Rigaud (Scholastic Press 978-1-33868-174-1, $18.99, 288pp, hc) July 2022.
Pro: today is Cicely Destin’s 15th birthday. It’s also the West Indian Day Parade, her favorite day of the year. It seems like all of Brooklyn has converted into a massive carnival, and Cicely wants to experience it all. Con: Cicely has to lie to her mom to sneak off with her ...Read More
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Eversion, Alastair Reynolds (Gollancz 978-0575090767, hardcover, 320pp, £20.00) May 2022. (US edition Orbit 978-0316462822, 352pp,$17.99 August 2022.)
Alistair Reynolds is a grand writer with many arrows in his quiver. But I never suspected him of having any great fondness for the work of Philip K. Dick, nor of being prone to write an homage to that master of SF metaphysical surrealism. And yet that is just what he delivers, ...Read More
Read moreFan and scholar JUSTIN E.A. BUSCH, 63, died October 21, 2022. He was best known in the field for his first book, The Utopian Vision of H.G. Wells (2009), and for his work in fanzines.
Justin Edwin Anton Busch was born April 23, 1959 in St. Louis MO. He lived in Nashville TN as a child before moving with his family to Geneva NY. He earned a BA in ...Read More
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The Thousand Earths, Stephen Baxter (Gollancz 978-1 473-22890-0, £22.00, 586 pp, hc) September 2022.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Stephen Baxter’s work sprawls, narratively, spatially, temporally, conceptually, and cosmologically. He also has a fondness for extravagantly displacing his protagonists and for setting his stories in strange and mysterious environments. And he does love a comprehensive, apocalyptic disaster – see his recent World Engines: Destroyer or ...Read More
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Ithaca, Claire North (Orbit 978-0-31642-296-3, $28.00, 400pp, tp) September 2022. Cover by Lisa Marie Pompilio.
People have been doing rewrites of Greek myths since they were first shared in the agora: the different births of Aphrodite, the many fates of Iphigenia, and so on. The last few decades have seen feminist reworkings of these epic stories, bringing women to the forefront, with (it must be said) varying levels of ...Read More
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The USA Today Bestseller List is currently on hiatus, with their last update to the list on December 1, 2022. The USA Today list began in 1993, and “is a ranking of the top-selling titles each week from a broad range of retail outlets including major chains, independent bookstores and online retailers. It reflects combined sales of titles in print and electronic format, if available.”
Longtime editor Mary Cadden has ...Read More
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The 14-title longlist for the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize has been announced, including titles and authors of genre interest:
Finalists will be announced March 6, 2023, and the winner will
The Huntington Library in San Marino CA announced that they have acquired the papers of Thomas Pynchon. The collection filled 48 boxes: “70 linear feet of materials created between the late 1950s and the 2020s — including typescripts and drafts of each of his novels, handwritten notes, correspondence, and research.” Pynchon’s papers were collected and represented by his son, Jackson Pynchon. The materials are being processed and will be available ...Read More
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Finalists for the 100 Year Starship (100YSS) 2022 Canopus Awards for Excellence in Interstellar Writing have been announced. Canopus recognizes “the finest fiction and non-fiction works that expand our understanding of the challenges, opportunities, pitfalls, and rewards of interstellar space exploration.”
Published Long-Form Fiction (40,000 words or more)
MILESTONES
SF writers J. DIANNE DOTSON & GARETH L. POWELL were married November 5, 2022 in a small ceremony held in Los Angeles CA. Dotson designed her wedding dress herself: “I chose red as it is my favorite color and it honors Gareth being half-Welsh, given the colors of the Welsh flag.”
ALICIA WANSTALL-BURKE is now represented by the John Jarrold Literary Agency.
STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES is the ...Read More
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Titan, Mado Nozaki (Airship 978-1-68579-318-0, $14.99, 496pp, tp) October 2022.
In Mado Nozaki’s Titan (translated by Evan Ward), humans of the 23rd century have it pretty easy – a life of fully automated luxury, all facilitated by omnipresent, omnibenevolent AI. All of that is threatened when one node of the Titan network – Coeus – begins to suffer mysterious problems, and Seika Naisho, an average citizen who studies psychology ...Read More
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Future SF is going on hiatus following the publication of the December 2022 issue, #17.
Editor Alex Shvartsman says,
Running a magazine, even a quarterly one, is an extremely labor- and time-intensive enterprise. I’ve been really struggling to keep up with its demands for a while now and do not feel I can continue to do a good-enough job while also keeping up with my day job, family, and any ...Read More
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Valley of Shadows, Rudy Ruiz (Blackstone Publishing 978-1-98260-464-6, $27.99, 350pp, hc) September 2022.
Having not encountered a “Weird Western” in close to two decades (the last being the final volume in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series), I’ve now read three of them in 12 months. Last November, I reviewed Lavie Tidhar’s eclectic, strange but also moving The Escapement, while a couple of months ago, I spoke glowingly about ...Read More
Read moreThe 13th annual Xingyun awards for Chinese science fiction were presented by the World Chinese Science Fiction Association on December 10, 2022 in Chengdu, China.
Best Novel
Andrews, Ilona: Sweep of the Heart
(NYLA Publishing 9781518741289, $20.99, 454pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, December 13, 2022)
Fantasy novel, the sixth book in the Innkeeper Chronicles. The inn is forced to host an intergalactic spouse-search for one of the Galaxy’s most powerful rulers after Sean’s werewolf mentor is kidnapped.
Dodge, Nathan B.: Hidden Enemy
(WordFire Press 978-1680573862, $25.99, 392pp, formats: trade paperback, hardcover, ebook, December 13, 2022)
SF ...Read More
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The Oleander Sword, Tasha Suri (Orbit 978-0-316-53856-5, $17.99, 513 pp, tp) August 2022. Cover by Micah Epstein.
Priya and Malini have fought, killed, and betrayed to gain power. The Oleander Sword asks and answers the question: what are they willing to do to keep it? Second in the Burning Kingdoms trilogy, this epic, Indian-inspired sapphic fantasy follows Priya and Malini as they join forces against Emperor Chandra, Malini’s cruel, ...Read More
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Winners for the 2022 Premio Italia Awards have been announced:
International SF Novel
Science Fiction Novel
Fantasy Novel
Collection
Anthology
Short Fiction — Professional
Article
Note that the USA Today list is not updated this week; the chart here carries over last week’s ranks.
Khan Wong is the author of the poetry chapbooks Wounded Apollo (Hozomeen Press, 1991), the dream of america (strangefever, 2001), The Imperfection of Holy Days (Web del Sol, 2002) and ecology (Noemi Press, 2003). His debut novel, The Circus Infinite, was published by Angry Robot Books in 2022. He has worked in the non-profit arts, played cello in an earnest folk-rock duo, been an internationally known hula ...Read More
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Beneath Ceaseless Skies 9/8/22, 9/22/22 Hexagon 9/22 Flash Fiction Online 9/22 September brought two issues of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, the first of which centers isolation and being trapped in bad situations and trying to navigate a way out, sometimes violently. In “Turn To Stone Ourselves” by Marie Croke, a stone Dreamer is living a second life long after their life in flesh ended. It’s as a statue ...Read More
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The Citadel of Forgotten Myths, Michael Moorcock (Saga 978-1982199807, hardcover, 336pp, $28.99) December 2022.
The legendary quip asserting that “The Golden Age of science fiction is thirteen” needs to be modified in my case, and, I suspect, in the case of many other readers. My personal Golden Age of SF lasted a decade: from the moment in 1965 (I was ten) when I discovered Raymond F. Jones’s The ...Read More
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The Best of World SF: Volume 2, Lavie Tidhar, ed. (Head of Zeus 978-1-80328-031-8, £25.00, 656pp, hc) October 2022.
Lavie Tidhar is prolific. His first volume of The Best of World SF came out in 2021 – the same year as his novels The Hood and The Escapement and collection The Lunacy Commission– and now this second volume arrives just a year later (along with two other novels). ...Read More
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Black Cat Weekly is shutting down their website on January 2, 2023, and will now be hosted at <blackcatweekly.com>. Subscribers should be migrated automatically, but if they “receive a renewal notice from PayWhirl.com, please cancel through PayWhirl.com and renew through blackcatweekly.com instead – the new web site is faster, easier, and allows you to manage your account directly. It’s just better!”
While you are here, please take a moment ...Read More
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