Phenderson Djèlí Clark is the pen name of Dexter Gabriel, born June 11, 1971 in Queens NY to immigrant parents from Trinidad and Tobago. His family sent him to live in Trinidad with his grandparents when he was a baby, and he returned to the US when he was eight. He lived in Staten Island and Brooklyn until moving to Houston TX when he was 12. He got his BA ...Read More
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Sarah Pinsker was born in New York and lived in various places in the US (including Illinois and Texas) before her family settled in Toronto, Canada when she was 14. She returned to the US for college and has remained here since.
Her first professional sale was “20 Ways the Desert Could Kill You” in 2012. She followed that with Sturgeon Award winning “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind” (2013), ...Read More
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At first glance you might think this topic is too comic-nerdy for you, but I promise there’s a universal theme that applies to any reader. Oh, and comic nerds? Spoiler alert.
For the uninitiated, Thor is a character from Marvel comics, created in 1962 by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber and Jack Kirby. The easiest thing to say about the origins is that Thor was inspired by Norse mythology by way ...Read More
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The Ruin of Kings launched the Chorus of Dragons series, and book two, The Name of All Things, is out soon. Tell us about the series.
Fortunately for me, A Chorus of Dragons really IS about dragons. Also: gods, demons, prophecies, so much magic, and the poor fools caught in the middle of that whirlwind. But dig a little deeper and the series is about the way massive systems corrupt ...Read More
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The latest Speculative Literature Foundation (SLF) Deep Dish Reading series was held August 8, 2019 at Volumes Book Cafe in Chicago IL. Co-hosted by Mary Anne Mohanraj & Chris Bauer, the event featured readings by Scott Woods, S.L. Huang, and T.J. Martinson. Other readers included Dawn Bonanno, Richard Chwedyk, Beth Kander, and Aurelius Raines II. These events are sponsored by the SLF with assistance from SFWA grants. The next reading ...Read More
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One of the ironies of the writing craft is that the more novels many of us write, the more difficult it is to write a novel. This appears to be a contradiction, but I hear it again and again from other professional writers, and I encounter it in my own work. It’s as if, once you know how to write a book, it gets easier to see the flaws in ...Read More
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Dublin 2019, the 77th World Science Fiction Convention, took place August 15-19, 2019 at the Convention Centre Dublin in Ireland. Guests of honour were Diane Duane, Ginjer Buchanan, and Ian McDonald; other guests of honour were astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell, fans Bill & Mary Burns, and game creator Steve Jackson. There were 6,024 attending memberships purchased, with 5,814 warm bodies, compared to San Jose’s 5,440 attending members and Helsinki’s 5,949. ...Read More
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The annual Clarion West writing workshop was held June 23 – August 2, 2019 in Seattle WA.
This story and more like it in the September 2019 issue of Locus.
While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and would like to keep the site paywall free, but WE ...Read More
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The Cascade Writers workshop was held July 19-21, 2019 in Bremerton WA.
This story and more like it in the September 2019 issue of Locus.
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The Alpha workshop for young writers was held July 24 – August 4, 2019 in Greensburg PA.
This story and more like it in the September 2019 issue of Locus.
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The 2019 Odyssey writing workshop was held June 3 – July 12, 2019 at St. Anselm College in Manchester NH.
This story and more like it in the September 2019 issue of Locus.
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Cadwell Wilbur Turnbull, Jr. was born August 12, 1987 in Chevy Chase MD, and moved to his parents’ home island of St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands when he was a month old. He grew up there, then moved to Pittsburgh PA to attend La Roche College, where he earned a degree in Professional Writing. After graduating he returned to St. Thomas for a year, where he worked as ...Read More
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‘Pemi Aguda received the 2019 Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship, awarded by the Carl Brandon Society to support a writer of color admitted to the Clarion Workshop, held this year June 23, 2019 – August 3, 2019 in San Diego CA. Aguda also received an owl necklace designed by artist Laurie Edison.
This story and more like it in the September 2019 issue of Locus.
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The Shared Worlds teen writing camp was held July 14-27, 2019 at Wofford College in Spartanburg SC.
This story and more like it in the September 2019 issue of Locus.
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The Launch Pad astronomy workshop was held July 22-28, 2019 at the University of Wyoming in Laramie WY. The workshop, founded by SF writer and astronomer Mike Brotherton, focuses on teaching astronomy principles to SF writers.
This story and more like it in the September 2019 issue of Locus.
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Silvia Moreno-Garcia was born April 25, 1981 in Baja California, Mexico, and grew up in various places throughout the country. She attended Endicott College in Massachusetts, where she studied communications, then returned to Mexico, where she married her husband; they immigrated to Canada 15 years ago, and have two children. She studied journalism in Canada and recently earned a Master’s in science and technology studies. She now works in communications ...Read More
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Editors Jane Johnson and Malcolm Edwards received Alfie Awards for their editing, presented by George R.R. Martin at the Hugo Losers Party, held August 18, 2019 in Dublin Ireland during Dublin 2019: An Irish Worldcon. Martin created the Alfie Awards in 2015 and named them in honor of Alfred Bester (whose The Demolished Man was the first ever novel Hugo Award winner), with trophies created using ’50s hood ornaments.
While ...Read More
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The Taos Toolbox writing workshop was held July 7-20, 2019 in Angel Fire NM.
This story and more like it in the September 2019 issue of Locus.
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When states had established religions and all-powerful churches, the clergy could impose many indignities on their parishoners merely by asserting that it was “God’s will.” Our modern secular religion is the worship of markets as self-correcting, self-perfecting systems that merely demand that we all act in our own self-interest to produce an outcome that makes us all better off. Whenever corporations thrive by making us all worse off, we’re told ...Read More
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Locus design editor Francesca Myman visited the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle, home to “Worlds Beyond Here: The Expanding Universe of Asian Pacific American Science Fiction”, an exhibit on view through September 15, 2019. The show includes two pieces by Myman: “Silkpunk”, illustrating Ken Liu’s work for the May 2015 issue of Locus, and “Axioms & Theorems”, illustrating Yoon Ha Lee’s September 2014 Locus interview. The long list of SFnal ...Read More
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The best science fiction I have read this year came in a series of emails from the future.
The Training Commission is a collaboration between authors Ingrid Burrington and Brendan C. Byrne, produced with sponsorship from Mozilla. It’s an epistolary work, a fragmented narrative in the form of electronic correspondence from a character on the run in a near-future USA that is both familiar and incredibly strange. Rich with worldbuilding ...Read More
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Lesley Nneka Arimah was born October 13, 1983, in London and grew up in Nigeria, Europe, and the US – wherever her father was stationed for work. She attended Florida State University as an undergrad and got her MFA at Minnesota State University, graduating in 2010.
Arimah’s short fiction has appeared in in Granta, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, A People’s Future of the United States (2019), and several other ...Read More
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The 2019 Sycamore Hills Writers’ Conference was held June 15-21, 2019 at the Wildacres Retreat Center in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Little Switzerland NC.
This story and more like it in the August 2019 issue of Locus.
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All ideas come from somewhere. For me, a book really starts taking shape when I have three separate ideas that come together. These ideas come from all sorts of places, but at least one of them is almost always from another piece of art. For example, for one of my novels, I found a gorgeous picture on Deviant Art that filled my mind with possibilities, and brought my story in ...Read More
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William Gibson was born March 17, 1948 in Conway SC and grew up in Virginia, attending boarding school in Arizona. He went to Canada in 1967 to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War, eventually settling in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1972. He began seriously writing fiction while studying at the University of British Columbia, where he earned a BA in English in 1977. That same year he published his ...Read More
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Laffcon 4, the world’s only conference dedicated to the work of R.A. Lafferty, was held at the Lawrence Library in Lawrenceville NJ on June 8, 2019. The event, co-sponsored by the Lawrence Library and the Northeast Lafferty League (NELL), included lectures, readings, panels, an art gallery, and a lunch reception. More information can be found at <ralafferty.com> and <laffcon.org>.
This report and more like it in the August 2019 issue ...Read More
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I had the good fortune of attending Another Planet Science Fiction Convention from May 22-23, 2019 at the Chaoyang Museum of Urban Planning in Beijing, China. It’s the second year of this four-track con celebrating Chinese and world science fiction. The conference is organized by the Future Affairs Administration (FAA), a private multimedia SF company looking to create a meeting place for authors, fans, movie producers and directors, special effects ...Read More
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Readercon 30 was held July 11-14, 2019, in Quincy MA. Guests of honor were Tananarive Due and Stephen Graham Jones; Edward Bryant was the memorial guest of honor. Total attendance was 700; highest warm body count an estimated 650 on Saturday. The focus of Readercon is “imaginative literature” – literary science fiction, fantasy, horror, and their intersections. Programming was deliberately organized, with topics ranging from book-club style discussions to academic ...Read More
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It’s taken some time for me to come to terms with the fact that I have developed fairly severe anxiety. When I say this out loud, of course, those in conversation with me often reply, “It’s 2019. Who doesn’t have anxiety?”
Anxiety is showing up sooner in children, too. My mom often points out that in her day, everyone was fearful of nuclear war, and the threat of climate change ...Read More
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The Locus Awards were held June 28-30, 2019 at the Executive Inn in Seattle for the 14th consecutive year. Connie Willis and Daryl Gregory emceed the ceremony. Attendance reached 160, starting on Friday night with readings by Willis and Amal El-Mohtar, followed by a Clarion West-hosted party in honor of first-week instructor Elizabeth Hand. Willis and El-Mohtar also taught the Locus Writers Workshops that bookended the weekend.
Saturday started with ...Read More
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NASA had a plan. A plan that would put people back on the moon by 2028. There we would build a base camp from which we would take the first steps toward landing human beings on Mars. It was a bold plan built on decades of science and experience, and it would have probably taken a few miracles to pull off. NASA, of course, has always been in the business ...Read More
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The Hexagon XII Retreat was held April 2019 in Crozet VA.
This photo story and more like it in the July 2019 issue of Locus.
While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and would like to keep the site paywall free, but WE NEED YOUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT to ...Read More
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