R.R. VIRDI is a two-time Dragon Award finalist and a Nebula Award finalist. He is the author of two urban fantasy series, The Grave Report, and The Books of Winter. He was born and raised in Northern Virginia and is a first generation Indian-American with all the baggage that comes with. He’s offended a long list of incalculable ancestors by choosing to drop out of college and not pursue one ...Read More
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Picking up after Thor: Ragnarok and Avengers: Endgame, the fourth Thor standalone film reunites the God of Thunder (Chris Hemsworth) with his scientist ex-girlfriend Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), his rock-alien-monster friend Korg (director Taika Waititi), and the fresh king of New Asgard, Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson). After a stint of adventuring with the Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor is shocked to discover that normal Earth mortal Jane has somehow reassembled ...Read More
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The Book Eaters, Sunyi Dean (Tor 978-1-25081-018-2, $26.99, 304pp, hc) August 2022.
In my distant youth, one of my favorite poets was Mark Strand, and one of his most widely reprinted poems began, ‘‘Ink runs from the corners of my mouth./There is no happiness like mine./I have been eating poetry.’’ It was a surreal and somewhat whimsical take on the idea of literature as consumer goods, but even at ...Read More
Read moreSalman Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses and other works of genre interest, was stabbed Friday, August 12, 2022, just before giving a lecture in upstate New York.
Rushdie, 75, is still hospitalized with serious injuries, including a damaged liver, severed nerves in an arm, a seriously damaged eye he might lose. He was taken off a ventilator over the weekend and is “on the road to recovery,” according ...Read More
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Winners for the Splatterpunk Awards, “honoring superior achievement for works published in 2021 in the sub-genres of Splatterpunk and Extreme Horror,” were will be presented at the 2022 KillerCon, held August 12-14, 2022 in Austin TX. Awards co-founder Brian Keene posted the winners to Twitter.
Best Novel
The 2022 Aurora Awards winners for works by Canadians have been announced.
Best Novel
Best YA Novel
Winners for the 2022 Sir Julius Vogel Awards have been announced by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Association of New Zealand (SFFANZ).
Best Novel
Best Youth Novel
RUDY RUCKER sold his literary archive to the Special Collections of the UCR Library at UC Riverside. “The Rudy Rucker Archive includes marked-up drafts of forty books, story drafts, letters, videos, audio, scientific papers, rare ’zines, and email.” Henry Wessells of James Cummins Bookseller negotiated the deal with Cherry Williams and Andrew Lippert of UCR.
JESMYN WARD will receive the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction ...Read More
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The Book of Living Secrets, Madeleine Roux (Quill Tree Books 978-0-06-294142-8, $17.99, 400pp, hc) March 2022.
If you are looking for a YA take on Lovecraftian horror, then Madeleine Roux’s The Book of Living Secrets is here to fulfill your needs. The title doesn’t start out as a date with Cthulhu however, as Adelle and Connie present themselves as two typical teenagers growing up in Boston with a shared ...Read More
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The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Del Rey 978-0-59335-533-6, $28.00, 320pp, hc) July 2022.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s The Daughter of Doctor Moreau is not a prequel or sequel to H.G. Wells’s classic short novel The Island of Doctor Moreau. It’s a reboot. And like all good reboots, Moreno-Garcia takes the key ingredients – Moreau’s “study of the plasticity of living forms,” his alcoholic assistant Montgomery, an isolated environment, ...Read More
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Clarkesworld 5/22 The Sunday Morning Transport 5/22 Future Tense 4/22
Two of my favorite stories in Clarkesworld for May are translated. “The Possibly Brief Life of Guang Hansheng” by Liang Qingsan (translated by Andy Dudak) features a rather melancholy narrator who becomes obsessed with an early science fiction author, Guang Hansheng, after seeing a snippet of his work in a museum. He begins a course of obsessive research, ...Read More
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Online magazine Daily Science Fiction, which also delivers stories to subscribers via email every weekday, is going on hiatus after 12 years. Editors Michele-Lee Barasso and Jonathan Laden wrote to subscribers on August 11, 2022:
Hi. Many of you have noted that we’ve been closed for story submissions for a bit. Many more of you (our most loyal supporters–Thank you!) noticed that today we just canceled automatic renewals for the ...Read More
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Chicon 8 has partnered with author Tamora Pierce to bring children and teenagers to Worldcon in a program called Tamora’s Legends:
Ms. Pierce is sponsoring VIP ACCESS for 20 kids and teens ages 10-17 to Chicon 8: The 80th World Science Fiction Convention for the weekend of September 3rd-4th 2022! Half the sponsored VIPs will be chosen from a local Chicago community organization, and half via online application and lottery. ...Read More
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BayCon 2022 was held July 1-4 in person at the San Mateo Marriott San Francisco Airport. Steven Barnes, Galen Dara, and Jean Batt were guests of honor; Tananarive Due was a featured guest and Bonnie Gordon was toastmaster. Over 700 memberships were sold, including 17 VIP memberships, with ~400-500 warm bodies. Programming offered 160 genre panels, 213 items total including gaming, maker’s workshops, and more. Panels covered topics such as ...Read More
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The Damage Done, Michael Landweber (Crooked Lane Books 978-1643859477, $27.99, 352pp, hc) March 2022. Cover by Patrick Sullivan.
Michael Landweber’s The Damage Done is a gripping mosaic novel that explores the way violence towards each other seems to be part of our DNA and what would happen to the world if we suddenly found ourselves unable to be violent to one another. At once a narrative about many lives ...Read More
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Dragon Con has announced the ballot for the 2022 Dragon Awards.
Best Science Fiction Novel
Best Fantasy Novel (Including Paranormal)
The Merciless Ones, Namina Forna (Delacorte 978-1-9848-4872-7, 464pp, $17.99, hc) May 2022.
Former outcasts turned warriors and liberators, Deka and her friends are back on the battlefield in The Merciless Ones, sequel to The Gilded Ones (reviewed here May 2021), this time to free the rest of the goddesses and women in Otera. As the Nuru, or only full-blooded daughter of the goddesses, Deka is the strongest of ...Read More
Read morePublisher, entrepreneur, and showman Robert “Bob” Self, 55, died August 3, 2022, as the result of an accident at Mono Lake in California.
Born August 5, 1966, Bob had a background in the entertainment industry and worked behind-the-scenes with a number of magicians, comedians, and illusionists. In 2003 he and his wife Rani — a professional costume designer for various TV series including The Orville — formed Baby Tattoo, Inc., ...Read More
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Writing app ProWritingAid is running a free online event, Science Fiction Writers’ Week, August 29 – September 2, 2022. The event will include:
Speakers include authors Samit Basu, Emmi Itäranta, ...Read More
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Samovar 4/22 Strange Horizons 4/18/22, 5/2/22, 5/9/22 Beneath Ceaseless Skies 5/5/22, 5/19/22
April also saw the release of a new issue of Samovar, the sibling publication to Strange Horizons that specializes in speculative stories and poetry in translation. Among the works in the issue, Azrin Fauzi (translated by Ali Aiman Mazwin) captures a weird and compelling journey of three people on the island of Malaysia in “Panorama People ...Read More
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Cover Reveal!
Check out this cool cover reveal from Potentia Press: a stunningly futuristic cover of Hamlet, Prince of Robots by M. Darusha Wehm. Love the neon skull!
Praise for the Book:
“Like Succession meets Blade Runner … an extremely compelling and satisfying read that allowed me to investigate my own place in our time of communion and interdependence with machines.” —Pip Adam, author of Acorn Prize winner The ...Read More
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Tell us about your debut novel, The Book Eaters — the world where it takes place, and the characters who live in that world.
The Book Eaters is set in an alternate 2000s Britain, where book-consuming creatures live in gothic manors at the fringes of modern human society. The main character is a single mother on the run from her book eater family, with her mind-eating child in tow, and ...Read More
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Adlakha, Sarah: Midnight on the Marne
(Tor/Forge 978-1-250-77459-0, $26.99, 368pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, August 9, 2022)
Alternate history/time loop fantasy novel. A soldier’s action changes the outcome of WWI, and he gets a chance to go back and set things right.
Chu, Wesley: The Art of Prophecy
(Penguin Random House/Del Rey 978-0-593-23763-2, $28.99, 544pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, August 9, 2022)
Fantasy novel, the first book in the ...Read More
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Gallant, V.E. Schwab (Greenwillow 978-0-06-283577-2, $18.99, 352pp, hc) March 2022. Cover by David Curtis.
Victoria Schwab’s Gallant is a dark confection, a tale that shares tropes with gothic classics (a curse, ghosts, a house of faded glamour that is shrouded in mystery) and pins its hope for a happy ending on a tortured heroine who is haunted by the secrets of a past she never knew. There is a ...Read More
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Finney and Gwen (Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw) are siblings in 1978 Colorado. Finney is a shy boy who wants to be tougher than he is, including wishing he had the nerve to get between his tougher younger sister and their physically and mentally abusive alcoholic father. The kids have to navigate their relationship to each other while dealing with bullies at school and the potential psychic abilities Gwen seems ...Read More
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VICTORIA AVEYARD is an author and screenwriter, born and raised in a small town in Western Massachusetts. She has a BFA in Writing for Film & Television from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. She is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling and USA Today bestselling series, Red Queen, and #1 New York Times bestsellers Realm Breaker and Blade Breaker.
For readers who haven’t ...Read More
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PulpFest has announced the winner for the 2022 Munsey Award, given “to an individual or institution that has bettered the pulp community.”
Nominees were selected by the general pulp community, with the winner selected by a vote of past Lamont,
Tom Doherty Associates, a division of Macmillan, is rebranding as Tor Publishing Group, effective immediately.
President and publisher Devi Pillai said, “Although the Tor name has always been associated with science fiction and fantasy, our list has included titles beyond that genre since our inception. With this name change and continued growth, the Tor name will now stand for quality in various types of genre publishing, with each imprint representing ...Read More
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Leslye Penelope James Reaves, who writes as L. Penelope and Leslye Penelope, was born April 18, 1978 in the Bronx in New York. Her family moved around when she was young, living in Washington DC and New Jersey before settling in Maryland when she was nine. She attended Howard University in Washington DC, where she studied film and computer science, and went to graduate school at Cal State Hayward ...Read More
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The Embroidered Book, Kate Heartfield (HarperVoyager 978-0-00838-059-5, $28.99, 672pp, hc) May 2022.
After reading Kate Heartfield’s thoroughly engrossing The Embroidered Book, with its account of the secret role of magic in European politics around the time of the French Revolution, I made the mistake of checking out what Wikipedia had to say about such topics as ‘‘secret history’’ or ‘‘historical fantasy.’’ Not too surprisingly, the depth and consistency ...Read More
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Finalists for the 2022 Washington Science Fiction Association (WSFA) Small Press Award for Short Fiction have been announced:
Omenana 4/22 Samovar 4/22 Analog 5-6/22
In its 21st issue, Omenana continues to bring a fascinating mix of fantasy, science fiction, and horror from African writers. “Madam Aisirhiowen’s Greatest Invention” by Amadin Ogbewe is an interesting story of a woman who transformed herself into a cyborg ruler. When we meet her she is deposed and staying with her great-granddaughter, building something with her minions. It’s pretty ominous, but ...Read More
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