Head On, John Scalzi (Tor 978-07-6538891-9,$25.99, 336pp, hc) April 2018.
John Scalzi’s Head On picks up where Lock In left off, for the most part. FBI agent Chris Shane still has Haden’s Syndrome, a condition where an infected person’s body remains inert while his or her mind roams free in a robotlike machine called a threep. Chris’s partner Leslie Vann, who does not have Haden’s, still remains the more impulsive ...Read More
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Locus will present winners of the annual Locus Awards with a new trophy, designed by Francesca Myman with art by Shaun Tan. The trophy will be awarded starting with the 2018 Locus Awards, and replaces the previous plaque design.
The 2018 Locus Awards will be held June 22-24, 2018 at the Best Western Executive Inn in Seattle WA. For more information, see the 2018 Locus Awards page.
While you are ...Read More
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Annex, Rich Larson (Orbit 978-0-316-41654-2, $15.95, 336pp, tp) July 2018.
By his own count, Rich Larson has published over 100 stories since 2012, with an impressive number of them making it into year’s best anthologies. That amounts to one of the more stunning debuts in recent SF, even as he’s largely been under the radar for major awards (possibly in part because of that very prolificity). This inevitably creates a ...Read More
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Alex Bledsoe, The Fairies of Sadieville (Tor 4/18) This is the sixth and final volume of the Tufa series, begun with The Hum and the Shiver (2011), about a hidden community of people descended from fairy folk living the modern Appalachian mountains. Film students Justin and Veronica discover a silent film that’s more than a century old, depicting a young woman transforming into a winged creature, and set off on ...Read More
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Meet Me in the Strange, Leander Watts (Meerkat 978-1-946154-15-6, $16.95, 234pp, hc) March 2018.
This is one unique book.
I was chapters into Meet Me in the Strange before I fully realized that the reviewer part of my brain needed to be turned off (stop noting names and locations, stop paying attention to setting descriptions and plot development) and I just needed to take the ride this book was offering. ...Read More
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Ann Dávila Cardinal and J Tullos Hennig are the winners of the 2018 Older Writers Grant, given by the Speculative Literature Foundation (SLF).
The Speculative Literature Foundation’s $500 Older Writers Grant is awarded annually to a writer who is fifty years of age or older at the time of grant application, and is intended to assist such writers who are just starting to work at a professional level. The SLF ...Read More
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Gnomon, Nick Harkaway (William Heinemann 978-1785151279, £14.99, 704pp, hc) November 2017. (Knopf 978-1524732080, $28.95, 688pp, hc) January 2018.
I know I’m late to the work of Nick Harkaway. I’ve meant to read his fiction since the publication of The Gone-Away World back in 2008, I even bought the book, but, for whatever reason, never cracked open the covers. I was planning on picking up Gnomon, until I saw it was ...Read More
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Shimmer magazine has announced that it will close with the November 2018 issue, after 13 years of publication. A final anthology will be released in late 2018. Publisher Beth Wodzinski says,
If you’re a reader — the site will stay up indefinitely, and we’ve got lots of great fiction for you to browse and buy.
If you’re a subscriber with a subscription that goes past November, you’ll get a separate ...Read More
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The five-title shortlist for the 2018 Edge Hill Prize for Short Story has been announced, including several titles and authors of genre interest:
The £10,000 prize is given to “a single-authored collection of short stories” by writers born or residing in the UK or Ireland. Judges for ...Read More
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Theodora Goss was born Teodóra Eszter Muszbek, September 30, 1968 in Budapest, Hungary. She left with her mother and brother at age five, and lived in Italy and Belgium before immigrating to the US when she was seven. They lived in New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland before settling in Virginia. She graduated from the University of Virginia in 1990 with an English degree, then attended Harvard Law School and worked ...Read More
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Macmillan is celebrating 175 years of operations with events throughout the year, with a “kickoff toast” event at Book Expo, May 30 – June 1, 2018 at the Javits Center in NY. They will publish a history of the company, The Macmillan Story, with distribution to their employees and authors. CEO John Sargent says, “We try to keep that family feel with Macmillan. We believe that staying true to our ...Read More
Read moreHalf a dozen letters from J.R.R. Tolkien sold at auction in May 2018 for a total of $36,000, with individual letters selling from $2,700 to $13,000. Two of the letters were sent to artist Mary Fairburn in 1968, praising illustrations of The Lord of the Rings she’d sent him, and including a signed original sketch by Fairburn. The other letters were to Oscar Morland (a British ambassador), Baronne A. Baeyens, ...Read More
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N.K. Jemisin will receive the annual Best of Brooklyn (BoBi) Award, and “is the first author of speculative fiction to win the BoBi.”
“The Brooklyn Book Festival (BKBF) is the largest free literary event in New York City, presenting an array of national and international literary stars and emerging authors.” The event will be held September 10-17, 2018 in New York with “more than 300 authors plus 250 booksellers filling ...Read More
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Several individuals of genre interest are among the 1,057 people recognized by the Queen of England in her 2018 Birthday Honours list.
Writer Kazuo Ishiguro was knighted “for services to literature,” and bookstore founder Tim Waterstone received a knighthood for “services to bookselling and charity.”
Authors Jeanette Winterson and Ken Follett received the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for “services to Literature” and “services to Literature ...Read More
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How To Stop Time, Matt Haig (Canongate 978-1-782-11861-9, £12.99, 33699, hc) July 2017. (Viking 978-0-525-52287-4, $26.00, 329pp, hc) February 2018.
The notion that living among us there might be immortals – or at least folks with very long lifespans – is itself an idea that just hangs on decade after decade, not only in SF/F circles but in popular potboilers like Viereck & Eldridge’s hoary My First Two Thousand Years ...Read More
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Literary Arts has posted the video of their tribute event for Ursula K. Le Guin featuring “Margaret Atwood (by video), Molly Gloss, Walidah Imarisha, Jonathan Lethem, Kelly Link, China Miéville, and Daniel José Older.” The event took place on June 13, 2018 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland OR. For more information, and to view the video, see the Literary Arts tribute page.
While you are here, please ...Read More
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NPR‘s summer reader poll 2018 is open to nominations of horror novels, collections, series, and short stories. Readers can nominate up to five titles through an online form. A top 100 list will be curated by Tananrive Due, Ruthanna Emrys, Grady Hendrix, and Stephen Graham Jones and announced later in the year.
For more information, see the NPR website.
While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus ...Read More
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Frankenstein in Baghdad, Ahmed Saadawi, translated by Jonathan Wright (Penguin Books 978-0143128793, $16.00, 288pp, tp) January 2018.
Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad places the eponymous monster amongst the suicide bombings and devastation of Baghdad in 2005. It opens with an attack on Tayaran Square where a soul, torn from its body, finds a home in a vacated corpse. It’s no ordinary cadaver, but rather a stitched-together amalgamation of parts, the ...Read More
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The Robert E. Howard Foundation has announced the winners for its 2018 REH Foundation Awards.
The Atlantean – Outstanding Achievement, Book (non-anthology/collection)
The Hyrkanian – Outstanding Achievement, Essay
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The Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP) announced the 2017 inductees to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame: comic book writer and publisher Stan Lee, author J.K. Rowling, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series, and The Legend of Zelda video game series. The inductees will be included in the SF&F Hall of Fame display later this year.
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame was founded in 1996 and ...Read More
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Solar Bones by Mike McCormack (Tramp) has won the €100,000 2018 International Dublin Literary Award, announced by Mícheál Mac Donncha, Lord Mayor of Dublin, during a ceremony at the Mansion House in Dublin Ireland on June 13, 2018. The award, “the world’s largest prize for a single novel published in English,” receives nominations from public libraries around the world and selects the winner by jury. The 2018 judging panel consisted ...Read More
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The Horror Writers Association (HWA) has announced the addition of a new Short Non-Fiction category to its Bram Stoker Awards. HWA president Lisa Morton said:
Works qualifying for the new award category include magazine articles, short essays, and academic papers, all of which must be at least 2,000 words but less than 40,000 words. The works must be published in a book (print or e-format), a magazine (print or online), ...Read More
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Midnight at the Electric, Jodi Lynn Anderson (Harper Teen 978-0-06-239354-8, $17.99, 257pp, hc) June 2017.
Jodi Lynn Anderson accomplishes something unique with Midnight at the Electric, taking a novel clearly set in the future, (the protagonist has just been accepted to a Mars colony program), but grounding it in a historical mystery. This is science fiction that has broad potential appeal; traditional SF readers will be attracted to the glimpses ...Read More
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Deadpool 2 continues the zany adventures of a smart-ass, smart-mouth mutant mercenary (Ryan Reynolds) whose powers are superhuman regeneration, looking melted, and being meta. When a time-traveling soldier from the future (Josh Brolin) attempts to murder the young mutant Firefist (Julian Dennison), Deadpool is set on a path to redemption. Bonus points: he gathers a team of other heroes, including Domino (Zazie Beetz), Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand), and Colossus ...Read More
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Winners of the 2018 Kurd Laßwitz Preis for best German science fiction works and translations have been announced:
Best German SF Novel
Latchkey, Nicole Kornher-Stace (Mythic Delirium 978-0-9889124-8- 9, $17.95, 336pp, tp) July 2018. Cover by Jacquelin de Leon.
Latchkey is the sequel to Nicole Kornher-Stace’s poorly known (and sorely underrated) Archivist Wasp. Archivist Wasp, published in 2015 by Big Mouth House, was a genre-straddling story: part post-apocalyptic coming-of-age tale and part fantasy quest, it structured itself as a literal katabasis – a descent to the underworld – in which a young ...Read More
Read moreWriter Christopher Stasheff, 74, died June 10, 2018. Stasheff is best known for his long-running Warlock universe, blending SF and fantasy elements, launched with his debut The Warlock in Spite of Himself (1969) and continuing through several sub-series.
Christopher Boris Stasheff was born January 15, 1944 in Mount Vernon NY. He attended the University of Michigan, studying radio and television, and later worked as a production assistant and script supervisor. ...Read More
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The winners for the 2017 Australian Shadows Awards were announced on June 9, 2018 during Continuum XIV in Melbourne Australia. The award is given by the Australian Horror Writers Association (AHWA) for “the finest in horror and dark fiction published by an Australasian within the calendar year.”
Best Novel
The longlists for the 2018 Sunburst Awards for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic were announced June 11, 2018:
Adult Fiction
Jeffrey Ford was born November 8, 1955 in West Islip NY. He flunked out of community college and took various jobs until he earned enough to buy a clam boat at age 18. He worked as a clammer for several years while writing on the side, until he decided to go back to school. He returned to the same community college, then attended New York State University, Binghamton, where he ...Read More
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The Cabin at the End of the World, Paul Tremblay (Morrow 978-0062679109, $26.99, 288pp, hc) June 2018.
Anyone who has followed Paul Tremblay’s short fiction, from the stories collected in the remarkable In the Mean Time, to “Where We Will All Be” in Joseph Pulver, Sr.’s The Grimscribe’s Puppets and “Swim Wants to Know If It’s as Bad as Swim Thinks” in Bourbon Penn magazine, knows that one of his ...Read More
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