James Morrow is a Nebula and World Fantasy Award winning author. His writing includes, among many others, The Philosopher’s Apprentice and Shambling Towards Hiroshima.

For the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, the world is a spiritual kindergarten. For the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the world is that which is the case. For the majority of science fiction writers, however, the phenomenon in question is first and foremost a planet. This materialist ...Read More

Jonathan McCalmont is a film, book, comics, and games critic. He blogs at Ruthless Culture.

Every generation contains a finite amount of creative talent and when that generation reaches adulthood, that talent decants itself into the creative scenes that appear most attractive at that particular point in time. Sometimes that talent flows into music, sometimes it flows into painting and sometimes it flows into writing an endless stream of articles ...Read More

After running a Roundtable discussion in support of Fabio Fernandes’ International issue of The Future Fire, I started thinking about the wonderful science fiction and fantasy that I’ve read in translation over the years. I thought it might be interesting to solicit guest posts from a wide range of people talking about both excellent translated stories as well as stories that haven’t yet been translated but really need to be. ...Read More

Karen Burnham

Last week we lost Ray Bradbury at the age of 91. Perhaps one of the most influential and most widely read sf authors of the last hundred years. Would anyone like to reflect on his passing?

As always, this discussion is broken up into multiple pages for ease of reading. If you’d like to read it all on a single page, select ‘View All’ from the drop down ...Read More

Michael A. Arnzen has won four Bram Stoker Awards (including one for Poetry) and has been publishing speculative fiction and poetry since 1989. His latest book is The Gorelets Omnibus: Collected Poetry, 2001-2011 (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2012) — a compendium of his twisted and often funny imaginations from the past decade. Arnzen holds a PhD in literature and teaches in the MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction at Seton ...Read More

David C. Kopaska-Merkel is the editor and publisher of Dreams and Nightmares magazine.

Speculative poetry. What is it and does it matter?

If you know what speculative fiction is, and you know what poetry is, then you know what speculative poetry is, too. The medium goes back a ways. One can argue that Gilgamesh is the oldest known mythic poem. If we just want to look at the last hundred ...Read More

Robert Frazier is an author, poet, and editor whose work has appeared in magazines such as Strange Horizons and Star*Line, as well as collections such as Invisible Machines.

Karen has asked me to pipe in with some historical perspective on speculative poetry. Antecedents like Blake and Poe and the Odyssey abound, but the movement didn’t gel until more recently. Take, for example, an art colony. Painters can work independently ...Read More

Joanne Merriam is the editor of 7×20 and Upper Rubber Boot Books, and her poetry has been published in Asimov’s, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Scifaikuest and Strange Horizons as well as literary markets like Cordite, The Fiddlehead, Room of One’s Own and Stand.

I started Upper Rubber Boot Books to publish those voices working on the interstices of the genres currently known as “speculative” and “literary,” since I’m against ...Read More

Mari Ness is a poet and a blogger at Tor.com.

Poetry, fantasy and science fiction have long been deeply intertwined. Some of the earliest myths were sung, not spoken, in resonant verse that still echoes today. Shakespeare combined poetry and fairies, as did Spenser – in highly popular entertainments.

And yet somewhere along the line, a gulf appeared and widened between poetry and prose in science fiction. As a result, ...Read More

Marge Simon’s works appear in publications such as Strange Horizons, Niteblade, and others. In addition to her poetry, she has published two prose collections: Christina’s World (Sam’s Dot Publications, 2008) and Like Birds in the Rain (Sam’s Dot, 2007). She won the Bram Stoker Award™ for Superior Work in Poetry for Vectors: A Week in the Death of a Planet (Dark Regions Press, 2008).

Genre (sf/f/h) speculative poetry has been ...Read More

F.J. Bergmann is the editor of Star*Line, the journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and the poetry editor of Mobius: The Journal of Social Change. Her poetry awards include a Rhysling. Her fourth chapbook, Out of the Black Forest, a series of conflated fairy-tale poems, will be published by Centennial Press in 2012. She manifests variously at Fibitz Reality Adjustment.

In my capacity as the editor of Star*Line ...Read More

Denise Dumars is an experienced writer of spirituality, horror and poetry, an editor, and a teacher and tutor of English at the college level. She has published two collections of short stories; two non-fiction books, including The Dark Archetype (with Lori Nyx), and numerous chapbooks of poetry, the most recent of which is Letting in the Dark (Yellow Bat Press).

It’s been said that Great Britain and the United States ...Read More

Award-winning horror author Gemma Files is also a film critic, teacher, screenwriter, Writer’s Guild of Canada member, wife and mother. In 1999, her story “The Emperor’s Old Bones” won an International Horror Guild award for Best Short Fiction. Her most recent book is A Rope of Thorns, with A Tree of Bones coming out later this year.

Although I’ve written poetry since I was a child—my first “real” sale ...Read More

An award-winning Laotian American speculative poet, Bryan Thao Worra holds a Fellowship in Literature from the National Endowment for the Arts. A professional member of the Horror Writer Association and the Science Fiction Poetry Association, his work is taught and published internationally. He serves as the Creative Works Editor for the Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement. His books include On the Other Side of the Eye, ...Read More

Ann K. Schwader’s most recent speculative poetry collection is Twisted in Dream (Hippocampus Press, 2011). Her previous collection, Wild Hunt of the Stars (Sam’s Dot, 2010) was a 2010 Bram Stoker Award Finalist.

I’m a member of both SFWA and SFPA, the Science Fiction Poetry Association. I have read both science fiction and poetry most of my life, and started writing science fiction poems in high school. Something about combining ...Read More

Mike Allen’s first short story collection, The Button Bin and Other Horrors, is scheduled for an early fall release from Apex Publications. He’s been a finalist for the Nebula Award for short fiction and won the Rhysling Award for poetry three times. He’s written two novels, both of which are house-hunting. He’s also editor of the poetry journal Mythic Delirium (new issue here) and the acclaimed anthology series Clockwork ...Read More

The Locus Kickstarter effort only has a few more days to run, but we’re wondering if it’s possible to get from $19,000 to $25,000 in these last few days. Here’s what we could do with the extra funds:

With $25,000 we could digitize and begin editing Locus’ vast store of microcassette author interviews, while doing our best to store the tapes long-term. The media these interviews are stored on is ...Read More

The Kickstarter effort doesn’t close until May, and we’ve not quite doubled our initial fund raising goal. But archivist Kate is already hard at work:

Hello from the Locus offices!

I’m thrilled to report that our scanner and some preliminary archival materials have arrived so I’ve finally been able to dig in to the archives. Though I’m still early in the A’s, I’ve already come across a gem I wanted ...Read More

From our archivist:

We’ve got exciting news!

We made the Kickstarter front page and were featured on their blog in a recent post. Those developments are entirely thanks to you.

The Locus team has been working hard behind the scenes to finally be able to announce: T-SHIRTS! We will be printing exclusive “backer”-only t-shirts with a cool, new Locus design to the lovely folks who’ve donated to this Kickstarter. We’re ...Read More

The Locus Foundation Ephemera Kickstarter is funded up to almost $16,000 now. But every extra bit will enable more work to be done on this fabulous collection. Offering additional encouragement to support this project, I present Guy Gavriel Kay.

Gary has indicated concisely why the collection Charles accrued is so important, and to more than just scholars of SF, or literature, or culture – but also to non-specialists. I don’t ...Read More

The Locus Kickstarter campaign has met its first milestone, it will be funded! They met their $9500 goal. But that’s no reason to stop the momentum! There are a lot of things that can be done with any extra money. Consider:

Should we exceed our funding goals, there are several projects waiting in the wings:

•     digitizing and storing Locus’s immense and historic collection of audio author interviews, currently only on

I hope that by now you have seen the news that the Locus Science Fiction Foundation is using Kickstarter to raise $9500 towards preserving the archives of the late Charles N. Brown. The fundraising effort has a deadline of May 7th, and over the next few weeks I’d like to feature some voices that will put the collection in context and raise awareness of how important it is. As a ...Read More