DENISE ANGELA SHAWL was born November 2, 1955 and grew up in Kalamazoo MI. (Their cousin Delores came up with the nickname “Nisi.”) At 17, Shawl moved to Ann Arbor to attend the University of Michigan. After leaving the university, Shawl worked as a bookseller, au pair, cook, janitor, and artist’s model. Shawl settled in Seattle in 1996, worked on publicity for Clarion West, and currently serves on the workshop’s ...Read More
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We’re pleased to premiere a career-spanning interview with one of our finest SF authors: Kim Stanley Robinson, by Jake Brown from About the Authors TV as the opening of their new season of science fiction and fantasy author interviews.
Robinson’s works are insightful, smart, entertaining, and center on ecological and global themes about the Earth and our future on it. Brown has been interviewing authors and musicians in a comprehensive ...Read More
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Tell us about your web video series About the Authors TV. How did it come about, and what inspired you to launch it?
I consider it a lightning bolt from beyond. Like so many authors, I was stranded at home over ...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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The magazine field is showing fatigue. While we still have new publications appearing every year, in 2022 we saw a higher number of venues going on hiatus, shifting away from print, lowering frequency, or dropping out entirely. On top of an army of rising costs, inflation, paper shortages, and more, editors faced the stressors of another year not-quite-post-pandemic and the exhaustion of constant overwork. And then the blow of 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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OSASUYI OKUNGBOWA, who writes as Suyi Davies Okungbowa, was born August 27, 1989 and grew up in Benin City, Edo, Nigeria. He earned a degree in civil engineering at the University of Benin. He earned an MFA in creative writing at the University of Arizona, and now teaches creative writing at the University of Ottawa in Ontario, Canada.
He began publishing SF with story “Breaking the Habit” (as Suyi ...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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Welcome to the annual Locus Recommended Reading List!
We are so pleased to share this list of excellent fiction! Published in Locus magazine’s February 2023 issue, the list is assembled by Locus editors, columnists, outside reviewers, and other professionals and well-known critics of genre fiction and non-fiction. We looked at 982 titles from 2022 in short fiction and long fiction. The final recommendations, trimmed down to a somewhat reasonable-length ...Read More
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Tell us about the Portolan Project. What’s the mission?
The Portolan Project’s mission is to provide creative writing and literature educational resources to speculative fiction writers and readers, especially those facing barriers to access.
We interview authors and other experts in the field on aspects of writing craft, post the interviews on our site and YouTube channel, and then use excerpts from the interviews to create free writing lessons (our ...Read More
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Author and editor adrienne maree brown grows healing ideas in public through her multigenre writing, her music, and her podcasts. Informed by 25 years of movement facilitation, somatics, Octavia E. Butler scholarship and her work as a doula, adrienne has nurtured Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Radical Imagination, and Transformative Justice as ideas and practices for transformation. She is the author/editor of seven published texts and the founder of the Emergent ...Read More
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ALEX JENNINGS was born November 30, 1979 in Germany, and lived in Botswana, the US, Suriname, and Tunisia. He settled in New Orleans 16 years ago.
Jennings studied at The Evergreen State College, where he met Octavia E. Butler, who encouraged him to apply to Clarion West. He attended the workshop in 2003, and began publishing short fiction of genre interest with “This is Mars” in 2005. His stories ...Read More
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Annalee Newitz was born May 6, 1969 in Santa Monica CA, and grew up in Irvine. They attended UC Berkeley, where they completed a PhD in English and American Studies in 1998; their dissertation was published as Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (2006). They began freelance writing in the mid-’90s, and have written full-time since 1999, mostly as a journalist focusing on technology and science. They ...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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SAAD Z. HOSSAIN was born April 22, 1979 in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He studied English Lit and Commerce at the University of Virginia.
His debut novel was Baghdad Immortals (2013; as Escape from Baghdad!, 2015). Other novels include Djinn City (2017) and Cyber Mage (2021). Novella The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday (2019) was an Ignyte Award finalist and has a sequel, Kundo Wakes Up, out this year. ...Read More
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JULIE ELIZABETH STARINK was born April 11, 1955 in Exeter, Ontario, and lived with her family on the air force base in Centralia. She attended the University of Waterloo, where she studied biology and met future husband Roger Czerneda, married in 1976. She did her graduate studies at the University of Saskatchewan, researching fish and the evolution of reproductive communication systems, and also attended Queen’s University. After that, she ...Read More
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Khan Wong is the author of the poetry chapbooks Wounded Apollo (Hozomeen Press, 1991), the dream of america (strangefever, 2001), The Imperfection of Holy Days (Web del Sol, 2002) and ecology (Noemi Press, 2003). His debut novel, The Circus Infinite, was published by Angry Robot Books in 2022. He has worked in the non-profit arts, played cello in an earnest folk-rock duo, been an internationally known hula ...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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