Clarkesworld 1/24
January’s Clarkesworld opens on a high note with “Nothing of Value” by Aimee Ogden. Skip technology allows people to travel long distances by allowing all the information about themselves to be downloaded into a new body at their destination while the old version is destroyed. The unnamed protagonist travels to Mars to meet up with a former friend/lover in hopes of rekindling their relationship. One of ...Read More
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The New York Public Library announced its five Young Lions Fiction Award finalists for 2024, including House of Cotton by Monica Brashears (Flatiron Books), Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Pantheon), and Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang (Riverhead Books).
The $10,000 prize is awarded “each spring to a writer age 35 or younger for a novel or a collection of short stories” by a panel of ...Read More
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Finalists for the 2024 Sir Julius Vogel Awards have been announced by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Association of New Zealand (SFFANZ).
Best Novel
Best Youth Novel
Both the Jhalak Prize for Book of the Year and the Children’s & Young Adult prize shortlists were announced today. The Children’s & YA shortlist includes Wild Song by Candy Gourlay (David Fickling).
The award seeks “to celebrate books by British/British resident BAME writers” and accepts “entries published in the UK by writers of colour. These include (and not limited to) fiction, non-fiction, short stories, graphic novels, poetry and all ...Read More
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Winners of the Tolkien Society Awards 2024 were announced on April 13, 2024. The awards “recognize excellence in the fields of Tolkien scholarship and fandom, highlighting our long-standing charitable objective to ‘seek to educate the public in, and promote research into, the life and works of'” J.R.R. Tolkien. The society’s trustees choose the shortlist, with winners chosen by the membership.
Best Book
Nominees for the 2024 CrimeFest Awards have been announced, including several authors and titles of genre interest.
eDUNNIT Award
H.R.F. Keating Award
Last Laugh Award
Best
The shortlist for the 2024 Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, honoring the best SF/F work published in France in 2023, has been announced.
French Novel
Foreign Novel
The shortlist for the 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize features authors of genre interest, including “A Song Sung in Secret” by Jayne Bauling, “The Devil’s Son” by Portia Subran, and “The Woman Upstairs” by Audrey Tan.
The Commonwealth Short Story Prize recognizes “the best piece of unpublished short fiction from the Commonwealth.” The overall winner receives £5,000 and regional winners receive £2,500. Regional winners will be announced on May 29
The Libertarian Futurist Society (LFS) has released the finalists for the Prometheus Award in the Best Novel category, honoring pro-freedom works published in 2023.
All members of the Libertarian Futurist ...Read More
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The shortlist has been announced for the 2024 Kurd Laßwitz Preis. The prize is awarded to German-language SF works published in the previous year.
Best German SF Novel
Doorway to the Stars, Jack McDevitt (Subterranean 978-1-64524-188-1, $40.00, 107 pp, hc) February 2024. Cover by Edward Miller.
In two novels nearly 20 years apart, Jack McDevitt offered a platter full of puzzles and oddities. Ancient Shores (1996) and Thunderbird (2015) begin with the discovery of certain artifacts and buildings on what, 12,000 years earlier, had been the shore of the inland sea of Lake Agassiz in North Dakota: ...Read More
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The Sunday Morning Transport 12/17/23, 12/3/23, 11/19/23, 11/12/23, 11/5/23 Uncanny 11-12/23 The Dark 11/23
By the time you read this, the new year of 2024 will no longer be so new, but there’s still some short fiction from the end of 2023 to catch up on.
A laundry that washes stars? Nikki Brazie takes the unique premise of cleaning luminous celestial bodies and weaves it into a touching tale about ...Read More
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Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and Sourcebooks have joined a previously reported lawsuit opposing Iowa’s SF 496, a law that seeks to ban books depicting sex or involving gender identity or sexual orientation. They join existing plaintiffs Penguin Random House; the Iowa State Education Association (ISEA); authors Laurie Halse Anderson, John Green, Malinda Lo, and Jodi Picoult; three teachers; and a high school student.
“We as publishers are uniting ...Read More
Read moreThe finalists have been announced for the 2024 Gotham Book Prize, given for best New York City-based novel, including We Are a Haunting by Tyriek White (Astra) and Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday). The winner will be named at the Queens Public Library’s annual gala on June 5, 2024.
The $50,000 prize was created in July 2020 by Bradley Tusk and Howard Wolfson to “support New York City and ...Read More
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The Baltimore Science Fiction Society (BSFS) has announced that The Splinter in the Sky by Kemi Ashing-Giwa (Saga) is the winner of the 2023 Compton Crook Award.
Other nominees were:
The award honors the best first SF/fantasy/horror novel of ...Read More
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“Locus of Control” by Zack Be is the winner of the 2024 Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award, for “original stories celebrating optimistic, near-future space exploration.” Trent Guillory won second place for “Extraction” and William Paul Jones won third place for “Saving Gallivander”.
Be and the runners-up will be honored in a ceremony at the 2024 International Space Development Conference in Los Angeles CA, May 23-26, 2024. Be will also ...Read More
Read moreArtist, editor, and author Trina Robbins, 85, died April 10, 2024 of a stroke in San Francisco CA. Though best known as a legendary feminist comics writer and artist, she was also a science fiction fan and occasional SF writer, with stories including “Lines from a Diary” (1992) and “Innana: Witchwoman” (2011). She wrote and illustrated a comics adaptation of Tanith Lee’s The Silver Metal Lover in 1985, and was ...Read More
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The Invisible Hotel, Yeji Y. Ham (Zando 978-1-63893-137-9, $28.00, 320pp, hc) March 2024.
Early on in Yeji Y. Ham’s intense debut novel, The Invisible Hotel, our narrator, Yewon, describes her mother’s daily ritual of cleaning of their ancestor’s bones in the family’s bathtub.
My stomach began to thrash. I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to smell it. Heat, breath, sweat, the odor that rose into the ...Read More
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Castro, V.: Immortal Pleasures (Penguin Random House/Del Rey 9780593499726, $17.99, 304pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, audio, 04/16/2024)
Dark fantasy novel about Malinalli, once the infamous Malinche who aided Cortés in his destruction of the Aztec empire, now an immortal vampire avenging conquered peoples by regaining their plundered artifacts, but also looking for love and intrigued by a horror novelist who finds her strange condition fascinating.
Chang, Molly X.: To ...Read More
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Three titles debut on lists this week. Kelly Andrew’s Your Blood, My Bones (Scholastic) ranks #9 on the New York Times‘ Young Adult Hardcover list; F.T. Lukens’s Otherworldly (McElderry) is #10 on the same list; and Jennifer Thorne’s Diavola (Tor Nightfire) is #114 on the USA Today list.
F.J. BERGMANN has been named Grand Master by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association. The award is given to “an individual living at the time of selection whose body of work reflects the highest artistic goals of the SFPA, who has been actively publishing within the target genres of Science Fiction and Fantasy for a period of no fewer than 20 years, and whose poetry has been noted ...Read More
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KENNETH MACRAE MACLEOD was born August 2, 1954 in the Western Isles of Scotland. He attended Glasgow University, earning a degree in zoology in 1976, then studied biomechanics at Brunel University outside London. He took a decade-long break from reading SF, and became a computer programmer for ten years. In 1988 he completed a Master’s degree in Biomechanics.
After finishing his thesis, he tried his hand at fiction, producing first ...Read More
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The Principle of Moments, Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson (Gollancz 978-1-47323-419-2, £18.99, 520pp, hc.) January 2024.
Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson’s The Principle of Moments, the debut original novel from the first winner of the UK’s Future Worlds Prize for Fantasy & Science Fiction Writers of Colour (in 2020), feels like an answer to the question of: What happens if you cross Star Wars with Doctor Who? And then make it queer (queerer ...Read More
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The Inhumans and Other Stories: A Selection of Bengali Science Fiction, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, ed. (The MIT Press 978-0-26254-761-1, 162pp, $19.95, tp). March 2024. Cover by Seth.
For about 15 years now, Joshua Glenn has been banging the drum for the historical and literary value of “proto-SF” published between roughly 1900 and 1935. He dubs this period, with a touch of dark whimsy, the “Radium Age,” on the grounds that ...Read More
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Asimov’s 1-2/24
The January/February 2024 issue of Asimov’s is bookended by two novellas, each involving the investigation of a crime. In Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “Proof of Concept”, Orli is a detective on an intergalactic cruise ship, investigating a seemingly straightforward murder. However, when she arrives at the crime scene, Orli discovers the body is actually a sophisticated hologram, leaving her to unravel what crime has actually been ...Read More
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The Horror Writers Association (HWA) has announced the recipients of its 2023 Specialty Awards.
Thunderstorm Books is the recipient of the Specialty Press Award, given “to a publisher whose work has substantially influenced the horror and dark fantasy genres.”
The Richard Laymon President’s Award, “presented to a member who has served HWA in an exemplary manner and shown exceptional dedication to the organization,” goes to Brian W. Matthews. The winner ...Read More
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Vineetha Mokkil is the recipient of the 2024 A.C. Bose Grant for South Asian Speculative Literature, presented by the Speculative Literature Foundation (SLF) and DesiLit.
The $1,000 grant is given annually to “a South Asian / South Asian diaspora writer developing speculative fiction.” Mokkil’s winning work is “No One Has To Know and Other Stories”.
For more information, see the SLF website.
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The Romantic Novelists’ Association (RNA) has announced shortlists for the 2024 Romantic Novel Awards, including titles of genre interest.
The Fantasy Romantic Novel Award
The Contemporary Romantic Novel Award
Author John Barth, 93, died April 2, 2024 at a hospice in Bonita Springs FL. Barth was famed for his (often hilarious) experimental fiction.
His debut The Floating Opera appeared in 1956, but he attained literary fame with his third novel, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960). His innovations occasionally led him into speculative territory, notably in Giles Goat-Boy (1966) and The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991). His 1967 essay ...Read More
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The Siege of Burning Grass, Premee Mohamed (Solaris 978-1-8378-6046-3, $27.99, 432pp, hc) March 2023.
“Weird” is a word that’s been worn thin with use, even in regular conversation. I hesitate to apply it in a genre sense – whether old or New – for fear of misusing it, wading too deep into niche categorization, or merely adding more wear to the term. But there’s a sense in which its ...Read More
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The 2024 Whiting Award winners have been announced. Authors of genre interest include Aaliyah Bilal and Yoon Choi, both in the fiction category.
The ten winners, “emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama,” each receive $50,000. The award was created by New York investor and philanthropist Flora Ettlinger Whiting in 1971. Recipients of the award are selected by an anonymous committee appointed by the Foundation.
For more information, including ...Read More
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Parasol Against the Axe, Helen Oyeyemi (Faber & Faber 978-0571366620, £16.99, 272pp, hc) February 2024. (Riverhead 978-0-59319-236-8, $28.00, 272pp, hc) March 2024.
Helen Oyeyemi’s new novel, Parasol Against the Axe, takes place in Prague, Oyeyemi’s home since 2013. Interviewed by The Guardian in 2019, Oyeyemi described Prague as a “very layered city; it could be a film set; it could be a fairytale; it could be a gritty, ...Read More
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