Malka Older and David Walton took part in the Galactic Philadelphia reading series with an appearance on February 13, 2018. Sally Wiener Grotta and Lawrence Schoen curate the series.
For more, see the Galactic Philadelphia site.
Sally Wiener Grotta, Malka Older, David Walton, Lawrence Schoen (by Tim Burke)This and more like it in the April 2018 issue of Locus.
While you are here, please take a moment to support ...Read More Read more
Tananarive Priscilla Due was born January 5, 1966 in Tallahassee FL, daughter of civil rights lawyer John D. Due, Jr. and leading civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due. She grew up in Miami, and attended Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism before getting her MA in English from Leeds University, where she studied Nigerian literature. She worked as a journalist for the Miami Herald after college, wrote full-time for 15 ...Read More
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Jeffrey Scott VanderMeer was born July 7, 1968 in Belfont PA, and grew up in the Fiji Islands (where his parents worked for the Peace Corps), Ithaca NY, and Gainesville FL, where he attended the University of Florida for three years. He went to Clarion in 1992.
VanderMeer’s first story of genre interest was “Night Prayers”, appearing when he was in high school in 1986; early work also appeared in ...Read More
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This list of 2017 speculative titles in translation was compiled by Rachel Cordasco, who founded and runs site sfintranslation.com. Corrections may be sent to locus@locusmag.com.
NOVELS
On winning the Oscar Award for best original screenplay, Jordan Peele admitted that he started his winning script for the film Get Out at least 20 times. Why 20? Because he just didn’t feel he could get the script to work, no matter how many times he tackled it.
Author N.K. Jemisin relates a similar struggle in the writing of her masterful novel, The Fifth Season. In her acceptance speech ...Read More
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2017 was a year of small watersheds and consolidations, rather than breakthroughs for African speculative fiction.
Roughly 40 short speculative fiction stories were published in magazines and anthologies, according to Wole Talabi’s database on the African Speculative Fiction Society website.
In some ways it was a year of sales to international markets. Wole Talabi, Cat Hellesin, and Dare Segun Falowo had important stories published in F&SF. Jordan Ifueko wrote “Oshun ...Read More
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Here are a few loosely connected thoughts about the previous year in audio, and what we might expect in 2018.
Old Favorites
This past year, new audio productions allowed us to revisit freshly relevant classic works of science fiction. George Guidall, himself a classic voice in audiobook publishing, lent his gravitas to Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, which raises issues about the devastation of climate change and ...Read More
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How to view the state of the field now? SF (and fantasy) are in some sort of pop culture ascendance – the rapturous reception of The Last Jedi on the one hand, and Wonder Woman on another hand, and even The Shape of Water (a more ambitious film than the more popular pair I mentioned, and yet also an hommage of sorts to 1950s monster movies) is surely evidence of ...Read More
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Tricia Reeks lives in the bear-infested mountains of Asheville, North Carolina with her mountaineer husband and her two ferocious French bulldogs. She is the founder of Meerkat Press, the co-editor of Behind the Mask: An Anthology of Heroic Proportions (a Kirkus Reviews Best Indie Book of 2017) and Love Hurts: A Speculative Fiction Anthology.
Tell us about how your press was founded. Why did you decide to get into publishing? ...Read More
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Last year I mentioned that most of the stories I was seeing were of short-story length, with few long novelettes or novellas. Although perhaps most of this year’s stories were still of short-story length, this year saw a dramatic resurgence of novellas. By one count, there were over 80 novellas published in the SF/fantasy/horror genres in 2017. Most of these were published as standalone chapbooks, and the ambitious new program ...Read More
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2017 has been a good year for dark fiction. Here’s a mere taste of the good stuff:
Some novels I enjoyed: Kit Reed’s Mormama is a marvelous southern gothic about a cursed ancestral home with three elderly sisters living within. When a divorced relative and her young son move in and an accident victim with no memory hides out in the basement, the haunts become active, whispering ugly secrets. Alas, ...Read More
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I’ve been writing these year-end summations for over a decade now, and I find it hard to think of a year when there’s been more really good science fiction and fantasy to record. (Of course, I’ve also read a few duds – omitted below – but then that’s always the case.) I’m not sure why 2017 has seen so many strong books. There aren’t many unifying themes across the works ...Read More
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More and more, as I look back each year on what has caught my eye, I find myself drawn to works of genre uncertainty, work that plays with what had been safely familiar tropes, and results in fiction where we cannot convincingly say: that is science fiction, or that is fantasy, or that is mainstream. It is here, it seems to me, here in these borderlands, these debatable lands, that ...Read More
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Angela Gaye Slatter was born May 16, 1967 in Cairns Australia, and grew up mostly there and in Brisbane and Ipswich. She studied French and history at the University of Queensland, later earned a master’s, and received a PhD in creative writing in 2012. She attended Clarion South in 2009, Tin House in 2006 and has taught writing at various writers’ centres, universities and festivals.
Slatter’s short fiction is highly ...Read More
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When I was 11 years old, a friend of mine took me by the hand and led me to a shelf in our elementary school library where there was a book that she said I “absolutely had to read.” That was the day I discovered A Wrinkle in Time and my life, no joke, was changed forever. I’ve read the book dozens of times since then, read it out loud ...Read More
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I didn’t read much new SF and fantasy this year. I spent a lot of time being anxious for reasons outside the scope of this essay (cough politics cough), and in times like that, I tend to revisit old beloved books, so I spent some time returning to works by Connie Willis, and Terry Pratchett, and Joe Abercrombie (I know, Lord Grimdark might seem an odd choice for comfort reading, ...Read More
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Usually the bulk of my reading is fantasy, but some noteworthy SF titles snuck in this year. I particularly enjoyed Jim C. Hines’s Terminal Alliance, a humorous military SF adventure featuring zombie janitors in space – but they’re wonderfully dangerous janitors, and the gradual revelation of the truth about how humanity came to this state is a gripping part of this first volume in the Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse series. ...Read More
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I’ve always subscribed to the big-tent view of horror fiction. While I don’t go so far as to say that horror isn’t a genre (it is), the edges of the field can be difficult to map, especially if your view of it is rooted in its concern with (to paraphrase Stephen King) a pervasive sense of disestablishment, a feeling that things are in the unmaking. 2017 provided a fine example ...Read More
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Grandmaster James Gunn continues to amaze with his level of productivity and commitment to science fiction as he approaches age 95.
The 2017 Campbell Conference, held at the University of Kansas June 16-18, featured a celebration of Gunn and his life in science fiction. A number of Gunn’s former students, including Pat Cadigan, Bradley Denton, Karen Hellekson, Kij Johnson, Christopher McKitterick, John Ordover, Michael R. Page, Nate Williams, Sheila Williams, ...Read More
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2017 by Adrienne Martini
Adrienne Martini (2015) by Anita BuzzySpeaking only as myself (rather than for Locus as an entity), 2017 has been the year when reading anything too full of conflict or featuring dark and complicated conspiracies hit far too close to home. When the non-fictional world starts to read like fiction, it’s hard to have much resilience left for the same in a made-up world. Again, I’m ...Read More
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[Editor’s note: part of our 2017 year-in-review essay series from the February 2018 issue of Locus]
But Serially –
Perhaps more emphatically than usual, this annual reflection should be labeled My rather than The Year in SF, since the sample is not only smaller than usual but skewed: only four of the 2017 novels I reviewed are free-standing (and two of those might not count as fully such – see ...Read More
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[Editor’s note: part of our 2017 year-in-review essay series from the February 2018 issue of Locus]
How do you sum up a year like 2017? It feels like it was a longer year than usual – and as I write this, it isn’t even over yet.
I don’t like writing about my favourite books, even my favourite books in any given year. At the time of writing, I’ve read 209 ...Read More
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At long last, the techlash has arrived, and not a minute too soon. I have been involved in the tech industry since I got my first programming job in 1988. I’ve been a sysadmin, a CIO, a trainer, a software company founder, and an activist. I’ve argued against terrible laws and argued for good ones. I’ve dreamed of the promise of tech and been haunted ...Read More
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[Editor’s note: part of our 2017 year-in-review essay series from the February 2018 issue of Locus]
The best science fiction of 2017 fell into one of two camps: tales of climate change or stories of colonizing our solar system. Kim Stanley Robinson’s magisterial New York 2140, a personal pick for best novel of the year, showed everyone a way forward on how to discuss climate change and our collective future ...Read More
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[Editor’s note: part of our 2017 year-in-review essay series from the February 2018 issue of Locus]
According to Barnes & Noble’s year-end summary, if we set aside J.K. Rowling and Rick Riordan, the bestselling genre-related novel of 2017 was Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, followed a few slots later by Stephen King’s It – novels originally published in 1985 and 1986, respectively. Amazon’s list adds Orwell’s 1984 (from way back ...Read More
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[Editor’s note: This is the first time we have run the yearly Magazine Summary online. Text has been edited for formatting.]
The short fiction market was strong throughout 2017. We added a few online markets to our review, though we did see a number of print markets shift to online only (that sticky distribution problem) and a number of venues went on hiatus or closed because of financial difficulties.
The ...Read More
Read moreBack in October of 2017 we announced that that SF Crossing the Gulf podcast, hosted by Karen Burnham and Karen Lord, had been made available via a dedicated archive page.
At that time, we shared that the archive page featured short descriptions of each episode (and links to the full details at SF Signal) for Season One, and that the rest of the episodes would be following soon. We’re pleased ...Read More
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Editor Ellen Datlow and contributors to her anthology Mad Hatters and March Hares read for the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series at KGB Bar in New York on December 18, 2017.
Back: Matthew Kressel, Genevieve Valentine, Ellen Datlow, Richard Bowes, Katherine Vaz, Kris Dikeman; front: Ysabeau Wilce. Photo by Ellen DatlowThis article and more like it in the February 2018 issue of Locus.
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Carrie Vaughn was born January 28, 1973 in Sacramento CA to a military family, and grew up all over the country before settling in Colorado, where she graduated high school. She attended Occidental College in Los Angeles, and got her Master’s in English Literature at the University of Colorado in Boulder. She attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 1998, and taught there in 2009. Vaughn began publishing short fiction in ...Read More
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Sometimes the question is raised—on either side of a perceived divide—as to why an author would combine history with fantasy rather than stick to one or the other. Well-crafted history and fantasy both have the effect of transporting the reader. Employing them in the same work can illuminate questions about history and historical perspectives, using the tools and possibilities of magic to explore the potential of humanity, then and now. ...Read More
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You will fail more than you succeed. You will remember the failures more often than the successes.
The people who believe in you now will believe in you always. Get rid of everyone else.
Readers will love your work. They will think this means they love you. They will be wrong, but do not correct them. You will no longer be yourself when you’re among readers, but an amalgamation of ...Read More
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What is more important in historical fiction: factual accuracy or dramatic effectiveness? As with almost all questions pertaining to the art and business of publishing, the most truthful answer is “it depends.”
For starters, the expectation of factual accuracy is often higher for “serious” literary historical fiction than it is for its speculative cousins, alternative (or “alt”) history and “secret” history. For those who aren’t familiar with those two subgenres, ...Read More
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