Jonathan Samuel Carroll was born January 26, 1949 in New York City to famed screenwriter Sidney Carroll and actress June Carroll. He graduated from Rutgers University in 1971 and married artist Beverly Schreiner that same year; they have a son, Ryder Carroll, inventor of the Bullet Journal. Carroll has lived in Austria since 1974, except for a two-year period in Hollywood working on films. He has taught literature at the ...Read More
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NASA has named the landing site of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover after SF author Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006). The rover was launched from Cape Canaveral FL on July 30, 2020 and landed in Jezero Crater, Mars on February 18, 2021. The mission will spend at least one Mars year (two Earth years) exploring the landing site region.
For more information, see NASA’s website.
While you are here, please take ...Read More
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The law firm of Hagens Berman is suing Amazon and the Big Five publishers in a class-action lawsuit, alleging that the publishers conspired with the online retailer to illegally fix ebook prices. Their initial complaint was filed in the Southern District of New York on January 14, 2021, and only named Amazon as a defendant, with Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster listed as co-conspirators. The ...Read More
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Within the Wires: Season 5: Voicemail, Jeffrey Cranor & Janina Matthewson; Amiera Darwish, narrator (Night Vale Presents, ten episodes, 3.5 hrs.) <www.nightvalepresents.com/withinthewires> August-December 2020.
The events of 2020 made it difficult for me to establish and hold the focus I needed to listen to audiobooks and write about them. (The super-long column in the January 2021 Locus suggests that I’ve maybe started to get my mojo back.) When I ...Read More
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The YA Book Prize 2021 shortlist includes genre titles Wranglestone by Darren Charlton (Stripes/Little Tiger) and Hold Back the Tide by Melinda Salisbury (Scholastic).
The £2,000 YA Book Prize is awarded to a YA title written by an author living in the UK or Ireland. Finalists and winners are selected by a panel of judges: Caroline Carpenter (chair), Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff, Rachel Fox, Will Hill, Layla Hudson, and Sanne Vliegenthart.
The ...Read More
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The Authors Guild, the Open Markets Institute, and various writing organizations (including the Horror Writers Association and the Romance Writers Association) have released an open letter to the US Department of Justice, urging them to reject the proposed merger of Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House on antitrust grounds:
The deal would bring well more than half of key U.S. book markets under the control of a single corporation, ...Read More
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Analog/Virtual: And Other Simulations of Your Future, Lavanya Lakshminarayan (Hachette India 978-9-389-25308-5, Rs399, 310pp, tp) February 2020.
Having thoroughly enjoyed Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s Analog/Virtual: And Other Simulations of Your Future, I’ve decided that all far-future dystopias should be structured as a series of linked short stories. That’s not to say George Orwell missed a trick by neglecting the perspectives of Julia, Mr. Charrington, or O’Brien; 1984 famously generates its ...Read More
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Kind of a Big Deal, Shannon Hale (Roaring Brook 978-1-250-20623-7, $18.99, 389pp, hc) August 2020.
When Shannon Hale’s thoughtful Kind of a Big Deal opens, readers quickly discover that protagonist Josie Pie (her stage name), is living the unenviable reality of having peaked in high school. After flaming out in an ill-thought Broadway attempt, she is now the nanny for a sweet little girl whose dynamic mother recently relocated ...Read More
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Nghi Vo’s novel The Empress of Salt and Fortune (Tordotcom) is the winner of the 2021 Crawford Award, presented annually by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA) for a first book of fantasy fiction.
Other finalists were:
Beaton, E.J.: The Councillor
(DAW 978-0-7564-1699-7, $27.00, 448pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, March 1, 2021)
Machiavellian fantasy whcih follows a scholar’s quest to choose the next ruler of her nation amidst lies, conspiracy, and assassination. Debut novel.
Boehme, Jillian: The Stolen Kingdom
(Tor Teen 978-1-250-29882-9, $18.99, 336pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, March 2, 2021)
Young-adult epic fantasy. A vintner’s daughter’s magical blood reveals her to be secret royalty, involving ...Read More
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Outskirts Poetry has launched The Outskirts Poetry Podcast, a bi-weekly podcast hosted by Jake Tringali and produced by Tringali and Melanie Stormm, which “marries SF Poetry/Fiction and the counterculture… geared toward writers and readers of speculative genre poetry and fiction who enjoy art that thrives at the fringes of society.” Season one guests include D. Scot Miller, Locus‘s own Josh Pearce, and Catherynne M. Valente. For more: <www.outskirtspoetry.com>.
While you ...Read More
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Finalists for the 2021 Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction were announced as part of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes:
The prize is sponsored ...Read More
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C.J. Cherryh is the winner of the 2021 Robert A. Heinlein Award, given for “outstanding published works in science fiction and technical writings that inspire the human exploration of space,” recognizing her body of work, “with emphasis on her detailed social science and commercial relationship based stories set in the space station rich Alliance-Union universe.” The award is administered by the Baltimore Science Fiction Society (BSFS).
The winner will receive ...Read More
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Red Noise, John P. Murphy (Angry Robot 978-0-85766-847-9, $14.99, 448pp, tp) July 2020. Cover by Kieryn Tyler.
It’s easy to find the Western that lurks beneath the surface of Red Noise, the novel-length debut of Nebula Award finalist John P. Murphy. A drifter wanders into a nearly deserted town and finds two sides in a long-term stand-off. Only in this version, the town is a converted asteroid named ...Read More
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The Only Living Girl on Earth, Charles Yu (Scribd Originals, subscription required, 43pp) January 2021.
Last year Charles Yu wrote one of my favourite novels of 2020, Interior Chinatown, the deserved winner of the National Book Award. It’s a comic, surreal and emotional story about the struggles of being an immigrant, and the child of immigrants, in America. Yu is not so prolific as to have written another ...Read More
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Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer, Tod McCoy & M. Huw Evans, eds. (Hydra House 978-0997951073, $17.95, 196pp, pb) February 2021.
Gathered here are 28 essays (six reprints, 22 originals) by instructors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, intended, as Tod McCoy explains in his foreword, as “a way to give back to a community who may not be able to attend the workshop by delivering thoughts ...Read More
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The results of the annual Clarkesworld readers’ poll for best story and cover art of 2020 were announced in the March 2021 issue:
Best Story
Best Cover
The QueerSciFi.com Flash Fiction Contest is open now through April 30, 2021, with the theme this year of “Ink”.
Tell us about ink (and the stain it leaves) on your characters, the culture, and the world, for better or worse.
We’ll be accepting works from across the queer spectrum, and would love to see more entries including lesbian, trans, bi, intersex and ace protagonists, as well as gay men. We ...Read More
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If you learned your economics from Heinlein novels or the University of Chicago, you probably think that “free market” describes an economic system that is free from government interference – where all consensual transactions between two or more parties are permissible.
But if you went to the source, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, you’ll have found a very different definition of a free market: Smith’s concern wasn’t freedom from ...Read More
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The March 2021 issue of Locus has interviews with Jonathan Carroll and Aliette de Bodard. The issue lists US and UK forthcoming books titles through December 2021. Kathleen Ann Goonan (1952-2021) and Rowena Morrill (1944-2021) are remembered with obituaries and appreciations. Main Stories include PS to Launch ParSec, World Fantasy Awards Judges, Baen’s Bar Controversy, SFWA Awards Recipients, and more. Cory Doctorow’s column is entitled ...Read More
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Fugitive Telemetry, Martha Wells (Tordotcom 978-1-250-76537-6, $19.99, 176pp, hc) April 2021. Cover by Jaime Jones.
At this point, everyone knows about Murderbot. If you don’t know about Murderbot, what rock have you been hiding under? (Is it a comfy rock? I could use a nice rock-based holiday, away from all the news. And the pandemic.) Martha Wells’s Fugitive Telemetry is the sixth outing in the award-winning Murderbot Diaries. It ...Read More
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Our very strange year invited, among other things, mournful reflections on a past that felt abruptly truncated, and a number of non-fiction titles, though surely in production before the world’s temporary suspension, were eerily attuned to this backward gaze. Then again, SF/F/H have a tendency to steep themselves deeply in their own genre pasts and traditions, even as they often compost these into unexpected futures, so the apparent synchronicity may ...Read More
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Deuces Down, George R.R. Martin & Melinda Snodgrass, eds. (Tor 978-1-250-22720-1, $28.99, 352pp, hc) January 2021.
Deuces Down is both the 16th and 30th book in the Wild Cards series. The anthology was first published in 2002; this new version is refreshed with added stories by Carrie Vaughn, Mary Anne Mohanraj, and Caroline Spector. Although referred to on the title page as a mosaic novel, it remains – despite ...Read More
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Part way through The Silence by Don DeLillo (Picador) I came across a passage that resonated with me more that it perhaps might have done in other circumstances. One of the characters, in one of those archetypal DeLillo conversations that have the dispiriting and disconnecting feel of overlapping monologues, asks: “Is this the casual embrace that marks the fall of world civilization?”
DeLillo’s novella was written before the pandemic that ...Read More
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The Jack L. Chalker Young Writers’ Contest is open to original science fiction and fantasy submissions by Maryland students “no younger than 14 and no older than 18 years of age.” First, second, and third prizes are $150, $100, and $50, respectively, and the deadline for submissions is March 31st, 2021.
The contest is run by the Baltimore Science Fiction Society (BSFS) and “Judges shall be drawn from the membership
Dissipatio H.G.: The Vanishing, Guido Morselli (New York Review Books 978-1681374765, $15.95, 120pp, tp) December 2020.
On the eve of his 40th birthday, a man decides to end his life. He tells us that 40 is “a point of passage… when maturity begins to decline toward old age. I wanted to be off while I was still thirty-nine, if only technically.” He chooses to drown himself up in the ...Read More
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For the first three or four months of 2020, I had a difficult time focusing on anything – reading, writing, watching movies – for long enough to complete it. I devoted the spring to forcing myself to sit with a book or piece of writing or film long enough to engage it, and to keep engaging it until I was at the other side of it. The result was a ...Read More
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“My Gardening Journal: Tales from a Psychic Gardener” by Jazmin Collins is the winner of the 2021 Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing. The award is “given annually to the best short-story written in the science fiction or fantasy genres by a full-time undergraduate college student,” and is accompanied by a $500 cash prize, publication in Asimov’s, and an invitation to ICFA (International Conference ...Read More
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Sascha Stronach and Yilin Wang will guest edit issues of SFWA’s The Bulletin for 2021. Stronach will edit issue #218 (September 2021), and Wang will edit issue #219 (December 2021). SFWA editor-in-chief Michi Trota said, “I’ve admired Sascha’s and Yilin’s work in SF/F and am excited they’ll be bringing their unique visions and perspectives to shape their issues of The Bulletin.”
For more information, see SFWA’s website.
While you are ...Read More
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Don’t Tell a Soul, Kirsten Miller (Delacorte 978-0-525-58120-8, $20.99, 384pp, hc) January 2021.
Kirsten Miller’s outstanding thriller Don’t Tell a Soul is not only a first-rate mystery, it also manages to address just what it is about certain ghost stories, specifically those involving dead girls, which are so culturally pervasive. The novel’s protagonist has a special affinity for these girls and how their personal histories and true motivations are ...Read More
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As I write, distribution of two separate COVID-19 vaccines is in progress in the United States. A new President has been elected and will soon be inaugurated. And on a personal note, I have welcomed my first grandchild into the world. A time of optimism, right?
At the same time, COVID cases are at or near their highest rate of incidence in the US (and indeed, in many countries). The ...Read More
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The Locus Selected Books by Author list has been updated on our Forthcoming Books page, with information from the March 2021 issue covering upcoming titles from genre houses slated through December 2021. Find out about your favorite authors’ upcoming books!
For the complete list of books by publisher, subscribe to our print magazine or purchase the March issue in print or digital editions, available March 1, 2021.
While you are ...Read More
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