Of course AI is a bubble. It has all the hallmarks of a classic tech bubble. Pick up a rental car at SFO and drive in either direction on the 101 – north to San Francisco, south to Palo Alto – and every single billboard is advertising some kind of AI company. Every business plan has the word “AI” in it, even if the business itself has no AI in ...Read More
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I suppose, before diving in, to put it in short, short fiction has opened a tremendous number of doors for me personally as a writer – craft-wise, career-wise, opportunity-wise. I don’t think the trajectory of my writing journey so far would have been as wildly fortunate and luck-filled – at least to me – without short stories.
In the summer of 2019, I met a man in a coffee shop ...Read More
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TOBI OGUNDIRAN is the author of Jackal, Jackal, a collection of dark and fantastic tales. Ogundiran has been nominated for BSFA, Shirley Jackson, Ignyte, and Nommo awards. His work has appeared in The Book of Witches and Africa Risen, and in several Year’s Best anthologies. His debut novella, In the Shadow of the Fall, is out from Tordotcom in 2024. Born and raised in Nigeria, he spent seven years in ...Read More
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When people proclaim that we’re experiencing a ‘‘Golden Age’’ for short fiction, I tend to look at them sideways. While we’ve seen an explosion of new markets over the last two decades, it’s never been a particularly healthy time for the overwhelming majority of them. For print editions, increasing postal and printing costs are eating away at profits. Those publishing online struggle face steeper challenges and often have unpaid or ...Read More
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Welcome to our special short fiction issue! We’ve got an interview with Carmen Maria Machado, best known for her National Book Award-nominated collection Her Body and Other Parties. We hosted a roundtable discussion with short story powerhouses Ted Chiang, Kelly Link, and Usman T. Malik – among them they’ve won seven Nebula Award, five Hugo Awards, four World Fantasy Awards, and a couple of Stoker Awards, too.
We’ve invited some ...Read More
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For most of human history, on clear nights our species could marvel at an untarnished view of nearly 3,000 stars. This view, shared by civilizations around the globe, was a wellspring of awe and speculation out of which flowed diverse myths and philosophies. Countless cultures have long traditions that connect stargazing with storytelling.
In the centuries-old Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, Princess Kaguya is a native of the Moon. ...Read More
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It’s tempting to think of the Great Enshittening – in which all the internet services we enjoyed and came to rely upon became suddenly and irreversibly terrible – as the result of moral decay. That is, it’s tempting to think that the people who gave us the old, good internet did so because they were good people, and the people who enshittified it did so because they are shitty people. ...Read More
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I was surprised as anyone when I found myself accidentally using a large language model (that is, an “AI” chatbot) to write some prose for me. I was twice as surprised when I found myself impressed by what it wrote.
Last month, an airline stranded me overnight in New York City when my flight to LA was canceled due to an air traffic control snafu. The airline rep at the ...Read More
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Note: This piece includes spoilers for The Sixth Sense, After Earth, The Usual Suspects and A Game of Thrones.
I love far future science fiction and survival horror and, a few years ago, I saw a movie trailer that seemed like it could be my kind of thing—Will Smith and his son crash-land on a mystery planet and have to survive its CGI perils. As the ...Read More
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On June 20, 2023, I will be awarded an Honourary Doctor of Laws from York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, in Toronto, Canada. The text below is the speech I will give.
Goodness me, it is a gigantic honour to be here today, and to be recognized in this way. I’m profoundly grateful to the faculty and administration here at York, and to my friends and family ...Read More
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It was a few months before Covid hit when the question first came to me: What would happen if one were to become addicted to travelling back in time?
I was living in Edinburgh, Scotland, and recently embarked on a Creative Writing master’s degree course. I was in a strange, reflective period in my life. I found myself constantly dissecting various aspects of who I was and pondering where they’d ...Read More
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One of the more baffling events of the first quarter of 2023 was the mass protest in Oxford (England, not Mississippi) against the “15-minute city pledge,” a movement to get city councils to strive for cities where each neighborhood is a walkable place, with most amenities (groceries, schools, health care, employers, leisure activities) located within a pleasant 15-minute walk from your door.
The 15-minute city is an extremely inoffensive and ...Read More
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Within the very first year of operation, 1878, Bell’s company learned a sharp lesson about combining teenage boys and telephone switchboards. Putting teenage boys in charge of the phone system brought swift and consistent disaster. Bell’s chief engineer described them as ‘Wild Indians.’ The boys were openly rude to customers. They talked back to subscribers, saucing off, uttering facetious remarks, and generally giving lip. The rascals took Saint Patrick’s Day ...Read More
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My usual comment on publishing and novels applies even more strongly this year. 2022 was an extraordinary year in global events and (I think) an exceptional one in the SF and fantasy it saw published. However, there’s so much lag between an event occurring, an author choosing to write a book about it, and the book making its way through the publishing process that it’d be a genuine shock if ...Read More
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I can’t, in good conscience, pass up the opportunity to alert readers that Mike Ashley’s The Rise of the Cyberzines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1991 to 2020, the fifth and concluding volume in his magisterial and unrivalled history of SF/F magazines from their inception to the (just about) present, was published in April by Liverpool University Press. Alas, I also can’t discuss the volume in any ...Read More
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It’s difficult to capture a year spent reading mostly short fiction and poetry, especially one where I’ve been trying to learn new reading patterns and settling into a new role as short fiction reviewer here at Locus. Short fiction and poetry always seem like a ‘‘blink and you’ll miss it’’ field, where new works are constantly incoming, and taking the time to pause and reflect can bow beneath the weight
I average three books a month reviewed for Locus, occasionally managing to squeeze in a fourth. Of the 40 or so books I read for the magazine in 2022, several impressed me either for their twisty surprises, unique stories, or the sheer beauty of their writing. In no particular order, here are my favorite reads of the year, each of which I heartily recommend.
Rebecca Ross’s fantasy A River Enchanted
I had already read my favourite book of 2022 while writing my Locus wrap-up for 2021. I knew as much at the time, remarking in my review: ‘‘I know it’s only January, but I’m sure [this] will be one of my best novels of the year.’’ The novel in question was John Darnielle’s Devil House, an astonishing metanarrative that questions the ethics of true crime books while recognising that ...Read More
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I read a lot of science fiction, fantasy, and horror in 2022, because I am (yet again) serving on an award jury, and my overall impression is that the field is healthier than ever, with standout work by established authors, impressive new writers breaking in, and stories from an ever-expanding chorus of voices capable of speaking to a vast range of human experience. I went through my long list of ...Read More
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While groping around for an organizing idea for this annual attempt to impose a shape on my shamble through the field, I kept coming back to maps and territories and borders. What follows is not a map of the field but a hand-drawn sketch of the back yard of my own long-cultivated personal tastes. And now that I’ve introduced the metaphor of the map: my wander through the titles had
First, I want to rave. It took me most of 2022 to finally catch up to online periodical The Sunday Morning Transport. Julian Yap, editor-in-chief, and Fran Wilde, managing editor, publish a single science fiction or fantasy (sometimes dark) short story (almost) every Sunday. Free subscribers receive one story a month. Paid subscribers receive one story each week, 50 weeks a year. Last year’s contributors included Max Gladstone, Karen Lord, ...Read More
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Every year fans of young adult science fiction, fantasy, and horror – like myself – are blessed with well over 300 traditionally published titles, between the Big Five, indies, and small presses. Even though covering YA SFF/H is a big chunk of my reviewing work, even I can’t keep up with numbers that high, much less the average reader. There are countless Best of and Notable lists wrapping up the ...Read More
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Since becoming co-editor-in-chief at Fantasy Magazine in 2020 (a gig I do in my spare time: Locus is my 40+ hour-a-week day job) I have little time to read just for pleasure. But I’m a regular reviewer at Lightspeed, and I run a short fiction discussion group. A benefit of these activities is that I read new and recent work beyond the Fantasy slush pile. This year’s reviews focused on ...Read More
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Another year closes, and with it, another year of memorable new books, a few of which close out many years’ worth of worldbuilding and character development.
Naomi Novik’s The Golden Enclaves, expertly wraps up her Scholomance trilogy about a school for wizards that is much, much darker and more fulfilling than anything that Scottish lady could imagine. While this third book buttons up El’s growth from a teenager into ...Read More
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I believe this is my third “year in review” essay for Locus, and I’m pretty sure the previous two have started with some version of “It was a great year to be a reader.” Well, 2022 was no different. In fact, I think every year gets better, and that’s a tough thing to do. In any case, I enjoyed a lot of what I read in 2022. Here’s some of ...Read More
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My favorite books this year have some dramatic themes: outcasts and revolutionaries, arranged marriages and lovers, generational gifts and curses, uprisings against authoritarians, fascists, and more. Having the opportunity to read some powerful novels this year meant that I could hardly choose just a few favorites for this special year-end essay.
One encouraging trend I saw this year was the youths (or ‘‘yoots’’ as some of us prefer) rising up ...Read More
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As I write this, the Locus Recommended Reading list for 2022 is still being finalized, but I can already attest that, as in past years, it contains both too many books and stories, and not enough. Not enough, because there inevitably worthwhile works that fell through the cracks despite our best efforts, and too many because anyone attempting even a semblance of a normal life would find it impossible to ...Read More
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Italian works of science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, and horror have increasingly found their way into English with each passing year since the start of the 21st century (like SF in translation – SFT – from many other countries), though the numbers are still quite small. Since 2017, both short- and long-form Italian SFT have hovered between two percent and eight percent of all translated SF each year. The exciting ...Read More
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Terrified by a war that has no place in the 21st century, the interest in Ukrainian history and culture has risen, including science fiction and fantasy. Writer Volodymyr Arenev and literary critic Mykhailo Nazarenko recently published a general historical overview of Ukrainian SF/F (translated by Alex Shvartsman) in Clarkesworld 9/22. Even earlier, in January 2018, Locus magazine published a short review of Ukrainian Fantastic literature by Michael Burianyk.
However, ...Read More
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As I type these words, a mass exodus is underway from Twitter and Facebook. After decades of eye-popping growth, these social media sites are contracting at an alarming rate.
In some ways, this shouldn’t surprise us. All the social networks that preceded the current generation experienced this pattern: SixDegrees, Friendster, MySpace, and Bebo all exploded onto the scene. One day, they were sparsely populated fringe services, the next day, everyone ...Read More
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There has never been a time when I didn’t know Locus.
When I was a kid, I liked to color. In everything. If I wasn’t melting my crayons, I was coloring in a coloring book, or on a tablecloth, or in a book, or on the inside walls of the linen closet. I loved coloring, and my dad, bless him, had a stack of these printed things that had cartoons. ...Read More
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If the bullies at the school gate steal your kid’s lunch money every day, it doesn’t matter how much lunch money you give your kid, he’s not gonna get lunch. But how much lunch money you give your kid does matter – to the bullies. Hell, they might even start a campaign: “The children of Jack Valenti Elementary School are going hungry! Congress must step in to give those kids ...Read More
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