2023 by Alexandra Pierce
2023 was a really good year for books! I’m going to focus on the books I loved that were written by women and nonbinary folk.
SEQUELS
It was a pretty good year for sequels. I would be a paid-up member of the Murderbot fanclub if one existed (let me know if I’ve missed that memo), so Martha Wells’s System Collapse was a welcome end-of-year addition to ...Read More
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Looking Back on 2023 by Liz Bourke
If there’s a theme that unites the books I enjoyed reading most this year, it’s power, violence, and survival. The damage that violence inflicts on those who suffer it, and those who wield it, and the ambiguities and challenges inherent in the ethical uses of power.
Of course, some of them were also just plain fun.
Three books stand out most. One is ...Read More
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Ten for 2023 by Tim Pratt
I wasn’t on any award juries in 2023, so I’m even less of a completist than usual when it comes to SF and fantasy in 2023. (When reading purely for my own enjoyment I tend to mix a lot of crime, comics, romances, and old stuff I missed the first time around with my shiny new speculative fiction.) Looking over the list of new ...Read More
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2023 by Alex Brown
In an unintentional yet perfect synchronicity of events, I’m writing this 2023 speculative fiction wrap-up on the last day of the year with a glass of Martinelli’s while waiting for the ball to drop. It was a strange, contradictory year, one with several professional wins and several more personal hardships. Going through my reading log, I got through more books this year than I thought I ...Read More
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Chengdu Worldcon, the 81st World Science Fiction Convention, received 1,674 valid ballots, down from 2,235 at Chicon 8. There were 1,847 valid nominating ballots (1,843 electronic, four paper), up from 1,368.
Nomination statistics weren’t released until the very last of the 90 days allowed, just before our deadline. They don’t include author names for nominees, and generally don’t offer explanations for why several items were dropped as “not eligible.” To ...Read More
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The Year in Review 2023 by A.C. Wise
It’s been an odd year for me, reading-wise. I served as a World Fantasy Award judge, which was a wonderful experience, but meant a large portion of my year was devoted to works originally published in 2022. As a result, I feel – even more than I normally do – like I missed out on tons of fantastic work published in 2023, ...Read More
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2023 in Review: Best. (Reading). Year. Ever.
I’ve remarked on the book-lag I experienced since the COVID lockdown, which saw my reading drop off a steep cliff. In 2023, I’ve felt more like my book-loving self, reading close to 90 books (compared to 60 last year). It helps that this has been an extraordinary year for fiction, the best I’ve experienced since penning reviews for Locus. I’m aware recency bias ...Read More
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2023 in Review by Colleen Mondor
There is a bit of a haunted story in my paternal family history that has preoccupied me since my father first shared hints of it when I was a teenager. We were talking about his father, my Pepere, who was born in Quebec and emigrated at the age of 13, with his family, to Rhode Island. I heard a few brief anecdotes over the ...Read More
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MARTHA SUSAN WELLS was born September 1, 1964 in Fort Worth TX. She attended Texas A&M University, graduating with a BA in anthropology. She lives in College Station TX with her husband.
Her debut fantasy novel The Element of Fire (1993) began the Ile-Rien series, which includes The Death of the Necromancer (1998) and the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy The Wizard Hunters (2003), The Ships of Air (2004), and The ...Read More
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One of Those Years
It has been one of those years that come along irregularly in which, wherever we look, we come upon literary treasures.
No fans of the short story, for instance, should complain about a year in which we have been gifted with new collections by Kate Atkinson and Steven Millhauser. Both writers, incidentally, who should be far better known among readers of the fantastic. Kate Atkinson’s first ...Read More
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When Howard taught at Clarion West, he’d tell students that they would only learn to write by writing, a lesson he also applied to fishing. We ended his first stint with two days of fly fishing on the nearby Cedar and Snoqualmie Rivers. Howard later wrote he had found Oz, prompting him in 1995 to move to the Oso General Store on the North Fork of the Stillaguamish, about an ...Read More
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One of my favorite openings of any novel is that of Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, in which he describes navigating a bookstore filled with Books You Haven’t Read, including “Books You Needn’t Read”, “Books Read Even Before You Open Them Because They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written”, “Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read ...Read More
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Artist/writer Winona Nelson was born in 1983 and grew up in Duluth MN. She has drawn all her life and began painting digitally as a teenager. She studied classical realism and art for the entertainment industry at the Safehouse Atelier in San Francisco.
Winona is a queer, Two Spirit Indigenous person, and her fine art often focuses on the stories and history of her tribe, the Ojibwe of Minnesota, and ...Read More
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In Shanghai Immortal I wanted to create a fantasy world that was fresh and cosy-nostalgic—the way Stars Hollows is for Gilmore Girls—but thoroughly irreverent and Asian. 1935 Shanghai as a setting was modern enough to be familiar, its glitz and glamour balanced by a dark underbelly of colonialism, racism, and mounting Japanese Imperial aggression, while being traditional enough to still have a firm grasp on the past. Much of ...Read More
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AI JIANG was born June 18, 1997 in Fujian, China, and emigrated to Canada with her family at age four. She attended the University of Toronto, the Humber School for Writers, and the Gotham Writers’ Workshop, and earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Edinburgh in 2022.
She began publishing work of genre interest with “Hello’’ (2021) in The Dark, and more than 35 stories have since ...Read More
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Andrea G. Stewart was born August 3, 1982 in Vancouver, Canada, and grew up in various places in the US.
Stewart began publishing work of genre interest with “Dreameater” (2013), a quarterly winner in the Writers of the Future competition. She has published more than a dozen other stories in anthologies and magazines.
Her first novel, urban fantasy Loose Changeling, appeared in 2014 under the name A.G. Stewart, and was ...Read More
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Tell us about your project. When was it founded, and who’s involved in running it?
The Sunday Morning Transport was founded in August 2021, and we published our first story in January 2023. Julian Yap is editor in chief, Fran Wilde is managing editor, and our copyediting, proofreading, and social media team is Kaitlin Severini (our copyeditor), Ryan T. Jenkins (copyedits and proofing), Delia Davis (year one proofreader) and Christine ...Read More
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Robert James Sawyer was born April 29, 1960 in Ottawa, Canada. His family moved to Toronto when he was a baby, and he has lived there ever since. He earned a bachelor’s in radio and television arts (broadcasting) from Ryerson Polytechnic University, Toronto in 1982. After graduating, he briefly worked at SF specialty store Bakka-Phoenix Books before spending most of the ‘80s as a freelance non-fiction writer, doing journalism for ...Read More
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When I give presentations to aspiring writers – particularly presentations on writing and selling short stories – I’m always careful to emphasize that short stories are no longer the apprenticeship into the novel world that they once were. I know plenty of folks who have sold science fiction and fantasy novels without ever having bothered with shorts.
That said, short fiction did kind of function as a proving and learning ...Read More
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Tell us about your magazine, Omenana. When was it founded, and who’s on the publishing team? What is your mission?
Omenana was cofounded in 2014 by Chiagozie Fred Nwonwu (AKA Mazi Nwonwu) and Chinelo Onwualu. Presently, Omenana’s publishing team comprises Mazi Nwonwu, managing editor; Iquo DianaAbasi, editor; Godson Okeiyi, graphic artist; Sunny Efemena, illustrator; and Chinaza, editorial assistant.
Omenana’s mission is to develop the writing and reading of speculative ...Read More
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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 have always loved short stories. I don’t remember a time when I ‘‘discovered’’ them. For me, there was nothing to find. They were always there; in school textbooks, homework assignments, in the anthologies I would randomly pick off the shelf at the library. There was never any question either of what I would start writing when I decided to learn story craft. In those early days, reaching the end ...Read More
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Tell us about your magazine, khōréō. When was it founded, and who’s on the publishing team? What is your mission?
In 2020, khōréō was founded with a specific-yet-broad mission: publishing speculative fiction by immigrant and diaspora writers. Our team currently relies on volunteers, with the idea that many hands make light work; on the editorial side, we have Aleksandra Hill as the founder, outgoing editor-in-chief, and publisher; Zhui Ning Chang ...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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Locus recently hosted a virtual roundable discussion with leading SF/F writers Ted Chiang, Kelly Link, and Usman T. Malik, who sat down for a wide-ranging and lively conversation about the art, craft, and business of short fiction, and the impact of the form on their creative work and lives. Excerpt from the roundtable follows.
TED CHIANG is the author of collections Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation ...Read More
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The SF in SF reading series hosted John Scalzi and Kimberley Unger for a reading and conversation to a packed audience on September 20, 2023 at the American Bookbinders Museum in San Francisco CA.
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 ...Read More
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CARMEN MARIA MACHADO was born July 3, 1986 in Allentown PA. She studied at American University in Washington DC, graduating with a degree in photography in 2008. She attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, graduating with her MFA in 2012, the same year she attended the Clarion Workshop. Machado has received fellowships and residencies from the Speculative Literature Foundation, Yaddo, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and other programs. She was ...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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