Voting has opened for the 2020 Worldcon and 2019 NASFiC conventions. Ballots for both are available on the Worldcon 76 site. Voting is open until August 11, 2018 to members of Worldcon 76 who have paid the voting fees ($30 for NASFiC, $50 for Worldcon).
The Science Fiction & Fantasy Conventions Of New Zealand Incorporated (SFFCONZ, Inc.) non-profit society has filed a bid to host the 2020 Worldcon at the ...Read More
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The finalists for the 2018 John W. Campbell Memorial Award have been announced:
The Smoke, Simon Ings (Gollancz 978-0-575-12007-5, £16.99, 298pp, tp) February 2018.
Simon Ings’s The Smoke – his second new SF novel in four years after having taken more than a decade off for more mainstream projects (including a fascinating study of science under Stalin) – is quite a bit more radical than 2014’s Wolves, which was judiciously and elegantly restrained in its examination of the possible impact of augmented reality, ...Read More
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The North Carolina Speculative Fiction Foundation has announced the shortlist for the 2018 Manly Wade Wellman Award. The award recognizes “outstanding achievement in science fiction and fantasy novels written by North Carolina authors.”
Final voting is open to members of three ...Read More
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Cadaver & Queen, Alisa Kwitney (Harlequin Teen 978-1-335-47046-1, $18.99, 320pp, hc) February 2018.
In Alisa Kwitney’s alternate history Cadaver & Queen, the governments of Europe are laser-focused on constructing armies of “Bio-Mechanicals.” These mechanized cadavers are perceived as the solution to the most painful cost of war: human soldiers lost to combat. The problem is that Bio-Mechanicals have proven themselves to be good at shuffling along and taking basic direction, ...Read More
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Several writers of genre interest were among the 31 new Fellows introduced into the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) in a ceremony held June 4, 2018 in London UK:
Potential new Fellows must have had published in the United Kingdom at least two substantial works (or a sufficient body of ...Read More
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The Lambda Literary Foundation has announced the winners of the 30th Annual Lambda Literary Awards (the “Lammys”), celebrating “achievement in LGBTQ writing for books published in 2017.” Winners of genre interest follow.
LGBTQ SF/F/Horror
The Soldier, Neal Asher (Night Shade 978-1-59780-943-6, $26.99, 375 pp, hc) May 2018. Cover by Adam Burn
Neal Asher keeps extending his already sprawling Polity setting, devising ever more dire and dangerous scenarios and filling in a deep history characterized by predation, warfare, genocide, extinctions, and the apparent impossibility of getting rid of any threat (or extinct species) permanently. One of the most persistent and destructive features of this universe ...Read More
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The Bi Writers Association (BWA) announced winners for the sixth annual Bisexual Book Awards on June 2, 2018 including titles of genre interest:
Speculative Fiction [Sci-fi/Fantasy/Horror/Etc.]
The Speculative Literature Foundation (SLF), Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), and the Chicago Nerds Social Club (CNSC) have sponsored the Deep Dish science fiction reading series, held at Volumes Book Cafe in Chicago IL.
The inaugural event was held on October 7, 2017 and featured Chris Bauer, Richard Chwedyk, Meg Khoury, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Cath Schaff-Stump, and was hosted by Mary Anne Mohanraj.
Further events in ...Read More
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I’m coming off a 16-hour editing day working on a novel called The Light Brigade, which comes out next year. The editing flurry was my fault – the book was three months late. Any later, and it was going to have to push to another publishing season.
Pushing a book out is a pain to everyone involved: the publishing machine is a capitalist enterprise like any other, and a writer ...Read More
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Jim Butcher, Brief Cases (Ace 978-0-451-49210-4, $28.00, 437pp, hc) June 2018. Cover by Chris McGrath.
This new collection in the Dresden Files series offers 12 entertaining stories, some real gems. Three of my favorites, previously collected as Working for Bigfoot, are relatively light stories about Harry and a sasquatch who needs help for his half-human son. Several take the viewpoint of characters other than Harry Dresden, with a couple of ...Read More
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Founder Kathryn Falk and her husband and co-owner Kevin Rubin announced that romance publishing industry magazine RT Book Reviews is shutting down, effective immediately. The long-running RT Booklovers Convention is also ending, with the one held this May 15-20 in Reno NV being the last. This year’s RT Reviewer’s Choice Awards were the last that will be given. Falk wrote, “After 38 years, I am retiring and ending my participation ...Read More
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Space Opera, Catherynne M. Valente (Saga 978-1481497497, $19.99, 304pp, hc) April 2018.
Like its acknowledged inspiration, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Catherynne M. Valente’s Space Opera is something of a Christmas tree: a fairly generic template adorned with so many glittering ornaments and exuberant sentences careening along like beaded garlands (some of Valente’s more ambitious sentences sound as though they need bongos for backup), that pretty soon the plot ...Read More
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Imogen Hermes Gowar’s The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock (Harvill Secker) is one of ten nominees for the Times Breakthrough Award, a category of the South Bank Sky Arts Awards that recognizes outstanding new British artists. A “panel of Times judges” will determine the winner, who will receive a trophy at an awards ceremony broadcast on Sky Arts on July 1, 2018.
For more information, see the Bookseller website.
While ...Read More
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Though Hell Should Bar the Way, David Drake (Baen 978-1481483131, $25.00, 416pp, hc). April 2018.
Though Hell Should Bar the Way is the twelfth and latest novel in David Drake’s Republic of Cinnabar Navy (RCN) series, published in the UK by Titan Books and in the USA by Baen. Drake is well known for his command of military science fiction – his record of success stretches back to the Hammer’s ...Read More
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The 11th annual Best Translated Book Awards (BTBA) 2018 winners were announced at the New York Rights Fair. The Invented Part by Rodrigo Fresán (Open Letter), translated by Will Vanderhyden, won for fiction.
The winning authors and translators will each receive $5,000 cash prizes. Three Percent at the University of Rochester founded the BTBAs in 2008. For more information, see the Best Translated Book Award site.
While you are here, ...Read More
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The Audio Publishers Association announced the 2018 Audie Awards winners, recognizing excellence in audiobooks and spoken word entertainment, at the Audies Gala on May 31, 2018 at the New York Historical Society in New York.
Winners of genre interest include:
Literary Fiction & Classics
The Locus Selected Books by Author list has been updated on our Forthcoming Books page, with information from the June 2018 issue covering upcoming titles from genre houses slated through March 2019. Find out about your favorite authors’ upcoming books!
For the complete list of books by publisher, subscribe to our print magazine or purchase the June issue in print or digital editions.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies 3/15/18
Lightspeed 4/18
Clarkesworld 3/18
Tor.com 2/18, 3/18
Bourbon Penn 3/18
In the May 15 issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Siobhan Carroll offers a powerful if slanted look at the course of a war in “The War of Light and Shadow, in Five Dishes”. A chef is captured by soldiers of the Iron Crusade, in the act of collecting an egg for his lord. The commander impulsively ...Read More
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The June issue features interviews with Jeffrey Ford and Theodora Goss; appreciations for Susan Ann Protter; an obituary for William O’Connor; a column by Kameron Hurley; US and British Forthcoming Books; the 2018 Nebula, Asimov’s Readers’, Analog AnLab, and Spectrum 25 awards winners; the Chesley, Clarke, Gemmell, and Shirley Jackson awards finalists; and reviews of short fiction and books by Rebecca Roanhorse, Barry N. Malzberg, Alma Katsu, Derek Künsken, and ...Read More
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Will Hill is the winner of the 2018 YA Book Prize for his novel After the Fire (Usborne). The £2,000 annual prize is given to the best young adult book written by an author living in the UK or Ireland and was presented May 31, 2018 at a ceremony during Hay Festival in Hay-on-Wye, Wales. Hill’s previous genre titles include the Department 19 vampire hunter series.
For more information, see ...Read More
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Time Was, Ian McDonald (Tor.com 978-0-7653-9146-9, $14.99, 144pp, tp) April 2018.
Throughout his career, Ian McDonald has demonstrated a remarkable versatility of style and language. His recent fiction has ranged from the YA sense-of-wonder exuberance of his parallel-world Everness series to the efficient social melodrama narration of the Luna novels, but he’s always been equally capable of great lyricism, and his new novella, Time Was, is a persuasive and gorgeous ...Read More
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Nominations for the 2018 Parsec Awards, honoring excellence in speculative fiction podcasting, have opened. Podcast material released between May 1, 2017 and April 30, 2018 are eligible for nomination, provided the podcast is free to download and allows for subscription. Nominations are open until June 15, 2018.
Judging will take place from July to September 2018, with an awards ceremony later in the year. For more information on the categories ...Read More
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The 2018 Hugo Voter Packet is available for download by members of Worldcon 76. An announcement has been sent to all members who registered their email address with the convention. The packet can be downloaded from the Worldcon 76 Hugo Awards website in the “Hugo Voter Packet” section.
The packet does not contain all the nominated works in their entirety, but there is some free material in most categories. The ...Read More
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MEM: A Novel, Bethany C. Morrow (Unnamed 978-1-944700-55-3, $25.00, 175pp, hc) May 2018.
MEM is a short novel with so many complex elements, so many wild and wonderful ideas, that summarizing it proves difficult. Yet the circumstances of its world are set forth so gracefully and confidently that understanding it is easy. In its opening pages a woman walks into a vault and explains to the receptionist waiting there that ...Read More
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A Call to Vengeance, David Weber, Timothy Zahn & Thomas Pope (Baen 978-1476782102, $26.00, 480pp, hc) March 2018.
A Call to Vengeance by David Weber, Timothy Zahn & Thomas Pope is the third and latest novel in the Manticore Ascendant series, which began with A Call to Duty and continued in A Call to Arms. Set several hundred years prior to the events of Weber’s Honor Harrington novels, the series ...Read More
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George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo (Bloomsbury) is one of the five shortlisted titles for the Golden Man Booker Prize, created to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Man Booker Prize and given to books that have “best stood the test of time.” One book finalist was chosen from each decade of the Man Booker Prize’s existence. The winner will be chosen by readers’ votes; voting is open on the ...Read More
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The Mythopoeic Society has announced the 2018 Mythopoeic Awards finalists. Winners will be announced at Mythcon 49, held July 20-23, 2018 at the Ritz-Carlton in Atlanta GA.
Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature
I suspect that science fiction will never run out of ways for things to go wrong with uploaded consciousness. Right now we can’t even simulate a mouse brain accurately, and maybe in the far distant future of Greg Egan’s Amalgam stories everything will be flawless (at least as far as the tech is concerned), but between now and then lies a vast and storyable gulf in which advances will be ...Read More
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The Hunger, Alma Katsu (Putnam 978-0735212510, $27.00, 384pp, hc) March 2018.
Every history is to some extent a secret history, offering new information on its subject, or, barring that, a fresh perspective, which may yield similar results. Nowhere is this more true than in books addressing themselves to famous subjects, which must make a greater effort to earn space on bookshelves already crowded. If historical fiction has the advantage of ...Read More
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Anne Bishop, Lake Silence (Ace 978-0-399-58724-5, $27.00, 402pp, hc) March 2018.
The need for understanding between humans and Others remains the crux of this first volume in a new arc in Bishop’s world of the Others. There are definite similarities with the previous volumes, such as the focus on bemused Others learning from a human female needing protection from bad men, but new characters and the small-town setting offer intriguing ...Read More
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