On a recent plane ride home from a major book festival, I ended up chatting with a woman next to me who had also been at the festival. “So, what do you write?” she asked, when she discovered I was an attending author. I reluctantly told her that I write science fiction and fantasy. “Oh, that explains why I didn’t see you on any panels this weekend,” she said. “I ...Read More
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The Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater Weird was held March 23-25, 2018 at the Plaza Suites Hotel in Santa Clara and the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose CA. Approximately 65 people attended. The event was organized by Anya Martin and Scott Nicolay, producers of The Outer Dark podcast, hosted by This Is Horror.
Members received a bag with stickers, a program chapbook with biographies and selected works ...Read More
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NICK HARKAWAY is a pseudonym for Nicholas Cornwell, born November 26, 1972 in Cornwall England, son of author David Cornwell (better known by his pen name John le Carré) and editor Valérie Jane Eustace. He attended University College School in North London, and Clare College, Cambridge, where he studied philosophy and earned a degree in social and political science. An avid martial artist, he has studied Shorinji Kan Jiu Jitsu, ...Read More
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One of the things I insist to my students is that no writing advice is one-size-fits-all, aside from the general notion is that one should put words down in some form or another. Some people do what we affectionately call “pantsing” after the notion that one is writing by the seat of one’s pants, flying into the wordcloud and seeing what collects on one’s wings along the way. Others outline ...Read More
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SF in SF hosted Michael Moorcock at the American Bookbinders Museum in San Francisco on April 9, 2018, coordinated by Rina Weisman and moderated by Terry Bisson. The event featured readings and signings, a Q&A session, a full bar, and time to mingle. Books were available for purchase thanks to Borderlands Books; Tachyon Publications sponsored the event. For more information, see the SF in SF website.
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Norwescon 41 was held March 29 – April 1, 2018 in SeaTac WA at the DoubleTree by Hilton Seattle Airport. The theme was “Uncovering Mysteries.” Guests of honor were Ken Liu (writer), Galen Dara (artist), and Mathew Wedel (science). (Wayne Barlowe was originally scheduled to be artist GoH, but had to cancel due to schedule conflicts.) Green Ronin was the spotlight publisher, represented by Nicole Lindroos and Chris Pramas.
Norwescon ...Read More
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Prior to my career as a writer, I worked for Iowa Homeland Security and Emergency Management in disaster mitigation. My job was to help communities prepare for natural and man-made events, some of them bordering on apocalyptic. I spent most of my time working with communities to prepare for these disasters, but I also spent time in the field observing and documenting the aftermath when disaster struck. Seeing how devastating ...Read More
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ADA LOUISE GRACE PALMER was born June 9, 1981 in Washington DC. She grew up in Annapolis MD and went to college two years early, at age 16. She attended Simon’s Rock College of Bard for two years, then transferred to Bryn Mawr College, where she studied Renaissance history. She did her PhD at Harvard, spending time studying in Florence and Rome, partly funded as a Fulbright fellow. She graduated ...Read More
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The 42nd Williamson Lectureship was held April 5-7, 2018, in Portales NM. The Lectureship, held to honor SF pioneer Jack Williamson, took place at Eastern NM University with casual gatherings around town. Santa Fe author S.M. Stirling, known for his Emberverse series and other alternate history efforts, was the guest of honor, and Connie Willis served as toastmistress. The theme for the 2018 Lectureship was “Changes.” The event, often dubbed ...Read More
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The third SF New Year Gala, a special online publication project organized by Future Affairs Administration (FAA), went viral over the Chinese New Year in February 2018. Twenty-one SF stories and artworks by distinctive SF writers and artists from China, Korea, and US were published daily on multiple major new-media publication platforms during February 5-25, receiving a total of 9.2 million views. A follow-up writer’s workshop took place in Beijing, ...Read More
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Incentives matter.
The dominance of ad-supported businesses online created an odd and perverse incentive to “maximize engagement” – to go to enormous lengths to create tools that people used for as long as possible, even when this made the product worse. Think of how Google added a “trending searches” dropdown to the default search-bar on Android, so that any time you went looking for a specific piece of information (the ...Read More
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The 39th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) took place March 14-18, 2018 at the Orlando Airport Marriot Hotel. The theme was ”200 Years of the Fantastic: Celebrating Frankenstein and Mary Shelley”. Academics, writers, publishers, editors, artists, students, independent scholars, and more participated, with about 457 people attending (down from 490 last year) and about 306 either presenting a paper or appearing on a panel (up from ...Read More
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The annual Rainforest Writers Village retreat, hosted by Patrick Swenson and Fairwood Press, was held at Lake Quinault WA in three sessions: Feb 21-25, Feb 28-March 4, and March 7-11, 2018. For more information, see the Rainforest Writers website.
This and more like it in the May 2018 issue of Locus.
While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We ...Read More
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A Marvel movie, an afrofuturistic dream, a box office phenomenon… and more? We take a side step from page to screen to comment on the many ways that Black Panther works, and works well. We also hint at future podcasts to compare text to film in other adaptations such as A Wrinkle in Time, Annihilation, and Arrival (2016).
https://locusmag.com/sfcrossingthegulf/sfgulf19.mp3Download mp3 file.
Note: This podcast and all previous ...Read More
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Sarah Pinsker’s first professional sale was “20 Ways the Desert Could Kill You” in 2012. She followed that with the Sturgeon Award-winning “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind”, also her first Nebula Award-nominated story. She has since won the Nebula Award for novelette “Our Lady of the Open Road.” Her 40+ stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, F&SF, Lightspeed, and Uncanny, among others, and numerous anthologies. Her first collection, ...Read More
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Michelle Sagara was born in, and has spent all her life living in, what is now called Toronto. Her long-suffering husband and two children have learned that there’s nothing terribly mystical or magical about being a writer, although the experience of watching their mother has made imposter syndrome and lack of critical objectivity about one’s work seem completely normal.
Reading is one of her life-long passions, and she is sometimes ...Read More
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The 2018 Friends of Genre convention (FOGcon 8) was held March 9-11 at the Walnut Creek Marriot in Walnut Creek CA. 190 memberships were sold, plus an additional 32 day passes. The theme was “Performance in SF&F”, with honored guests Andrea Hairston, Ada Palmer, and Thomas M. Disch (posthumously).
Programming included 74 participants and 55 slots, with panels on science, writing, publishing, literature, politics, and more, with titles such as ...Read More
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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.
This and more like it in the April 2018 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 ...Read More
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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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StokerCon, sponsored by the Horror Writers Association, was held at the Biltmore in Providence RI, March 1-4, 2018. HWA president Lisa Morton said, “It’s hard to beat hundreds of horror-lovers huddled together in a supposedly haunted hotel while a Nor’easter rages outside.” Guests of honor were Ramsey Campbell, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Victor LaValle, Elizabeth Massie, Sam Weller, and Craig Engler; Jeff Strand was emcee. Morton said, “This was our third ...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 ...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 ...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 ...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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