Penguin Classics plans to “celebrate science fiction as the essential genre of modern times” with a new series of science fiction classics. Titles launching in August include Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Flatland by Edwin Abbott, and Ten Thousand Light-years from Home by James Tiptree, Jr. Penguin also plans to publish well-known international science fiction translated into English, such as The Hair Carpet Weavers by Andreas Eschbach (Doryl Jensen, translator)

Jonathan Karp has been named president and CEO of Simon & Schuster, taking over after former president Carolyn Reidy died unexpectedly of a heart attack on May 12. He was promoted from president of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing, where he oversaw key books like What Happened by Hillary Clinton, Fear by Bob Woodward, and Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. He plans to “continue to build on the strong foundation

Death in Her Hands, Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin Press 978-1-984-87935-6, $18.99, 272pp, hc) April 2019. Vesta Gul (pronounced “like the ocean bird”) is walking her dog, Charlie, through the woods when she finds a note on the ground. The note reads: Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body. Except there is no body, “no bloodstain. No tangle of hair

The Fire Starters by Jan Carson (Black Swan Ireland) is on the shortlist for the €20,000 Novel of the Year category in the inaugural Dalkey Literary Awards, given by the Dalkey Book Festival. There are also finalists in the €10,000 Emerging Writer category. Winners will be announced June 20, 2020 at a digital awards ceremony. For more information, including the complete shortlists, see the Dalkey Literary Awards website. While you are

The Lambda Literary Board of Trustees has awarded the 2020 Visionary Award to playwright and author Jane Wagner. The Visionary Award “honors those who, through their achievements and passionate commitment, have contributed to the LGBTQ literary community in significant and tangible ways.” Wagner’s work of genre interest includes The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (1986). The members of the 2020 Lambda Literary Board of Trustees are

Max Barry, Providence (Putnam 3/20) Barry min­gles classic SF ideas, touches of satire, and deeply drawn characters in this entertaining SF thriller of war with aliens, a four-man mission sent to fight them, and the realization that their ship – and the people who sent them – are unreliable.   Elizabeth Bear, The Best of Elizabeth Bear (Subterranean 1/20) Bear’s wide-ranging skill is displayed in this collection of 27 stories,

Analog 3-4/20 Asimov’s 3-4/20 Pulp Literature Winter ’20 Uncanny 3-4/20 Analog offers several impressive stories in its March-April issue. Andy Dudak can be counted on for wild ideas, and “Midstrathe Exploding” delivers on that account. Ciaran is a pickpocket in Midstrathe City, which seems mainly known for the weirdly time-shifted explosion that engulfed it 200 years before and is still expanding with its victims frozen inside it. He has a

Finalists for the 2019 Australian Shadows Awards have been announced. The award is given by the Australian Horror Writers Association (AHWA) for “the finest in horror and dark fiction published by an Australasian within the calendar year.” Best Novel The Flower and the Serpent, Madeleine D’Este (Madeleine D’Este) Shepherd, Catherine Jinks (Text) Fusion, Kate Richards (Hamish Hamilton Australia) Best Short Fiction “Steadfast Shadowsong”, Matthew R. Davis (Dig Two Graves) “Vivienne &

George R.R. Martin (and two other investors) have purchased 18 miles of abandoned railway connecting the historic depot in Lamy NM with Santa Fe. He plans to restore the line as a tourist attraction and film shooting venue by 2022. For more, see Martin’s announcement. 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

J.K. Rowling will publish a new children’s book, The Ickabog, with free chapters appearing online every weekday in 34 installments from May 26 – July 10, 2020. The complete version will be published in November 2020 by Scholastic in the US and Little, Brown in the UK, with all royalties being donated to “help groups who’ve been particularly impacted by the pandemic.” Rowling is holding an illustration competition for children between

What do a haunted small-town librarian, genetically modified organisms, and police robots have in common? They’re on our New Books for the week ending May 26! New books this week are by Trudi Canavan, Mark Clifton, Meg Elison, Jeffrey Ford, Nancy Kress, Emily B. Martin, P.W. Singer & August Cole, and Sheree Renée Thomas.

Numerous upcoming conventions and literary events have been postponed or canceled as part of efforts to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus that causes respiratory illness COVID-19. The situation remains in flux as the full extent of the pandemic remains to be seen. We will update this story and our convention listing with further information about cancellations and postponements as it becomes available. The SFWA Nebula Conference, scheduled for

Patricia Briggs, Smoke Bitten (Ace 978-0-440-00155-3, $28.00, 342pp, hc) March 2020. Cover by Daniel Dos Santos. A new foe with a really nasty bite and some creepy magic keeps Mercy busy trying protect friends and family. At the same time, she’s re­ally worried about her mate. Alpha werewolf Adam hasn’t really recovered emotionally from the last big battle, retreating inside himself so far he’s even shut down their mage bond.

Suzanne Collins’ new Hunger Games novel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes published last Tuesday, is riding even higher on Amazon lists this week than last. Look for it on print lists next week.

Finna, Nino Cipri (Tor.com 978-1-250-24573-1, $14.99, 138pp, tp) February 2020. I suppose the giant retail emporium has served as a portal into shadowy realms at least since John Col­lier’s “Evening Primrose” almost eighty years ago, but the deliberately labyrinthine layout of IKEA stores seems almost designed for creepy stories – something that Nino Cipri enthusiastically takes advantage of in their novella Finna, which is partly a testy workplace romance and

Beyond the Outposts: Essays on SF and Fantasy 1955-1996, Algis Budrys (Ansible Editions/Lulu.com, 978-0-244-56705-7, $22.50, 378pp, trade paperback) 2020 The field of fantastika could never have reached its current flourishing condition, nor hope to continue forcefully, without the efforts of the small presses. These firms throughout the history of the genre and into the present have preserved many older works from oblivion and also offered homes to worthy living writers

King of the Dogs, Queen of the Cats, James Patrick Kelly; Stefan Rudnicki, narrator (Skyboat Media 978-1-09413898-5, $12.22, digital download, 2.25 hr., unabridged) January 2020. Veteran narrator Stefan Rudnicki’s deep, nasal, al­most lugubrious, voice (last appearing in this column in connection with Adam-Troy Castro’s short-story collection My Wife Hates Time Travel, and Other Stories) anchors the more absurd aspects of this no­vella, in which a circus serves as a focus

Numerous authors, editors, and pub­lishers are offering free material for readers stuck in isolation, including several of genre interest. J.K. Rowling, Bloomsbury, Audible, Overdrive, Pottermore, and Scholastic launched the “Harry Potter at Home” initiative, making the ebook and audiobook of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone free, and issuing a general read-aloud license for teachers so they can read from the book on video. There are also special activities for

An Orc on the Wild Side, Tom Holt; Ray Sawyer, narrator (Hachette Audio 978-1-47898841-0, $24.98, digital download, 14 hr., unabridged) Sep­tember 2019. Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City, K.J. Parker; Ray Sawyer, narrator (Ha­chette Audio 978-1-54915698-4, $24.98, digital download, 13.25 hr., unabridged) Decem­ber 2019. In the late 1980s, I fell in love with Tom Holt’s first novel, Expecting Someone Taller, an amusing work that took the characters from the

The Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth College has awarded the $5,000 2020 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award for Playwriting to Drive by Deborah Yarchun. A second-place prize, with a $750 honorarium, was awarded to Override by Elizabeth Keel. The Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards program was established in 2017 as an open competition to honor and support creative works around speculative fiction. The playwriting award is offered to

The International Board on Books for Young People awarded the 2020 Hans Christian Anderson Award to author Jacqueline Woodson. Awarded biyearly, the Hans Christian Anderson Awards “recognize lifelong achievement and are given to an author and an illustrator whose complete works have made an important, lasting contribution to children’s literature.” Woodson’s work of genre interest includes Harbor Me (2018) and “The Other Half of Me” in Tomorrowland: Ten Stories about

Romance Writers of America is retiring its RITA Awards and introducing a new award called The Vivian. Named after RWA founder Vivian Stephens, the new award “recognizes excellence in romance writing and showcases author talent and creativity. We celebrate the power of the romance genre with its central message of hope–because happily ever afters are for everyone.” A task force will present a proposed format for the Vivian at the

Fiyah Winter ’20 Beneath Ceaseless Skies 1/30/20, 2/13/20 Strange Horizons 2/3/20, 2/10/20 That We May Live: Speculative Chinese Fic­tion, Sarah Coolidge, ed. (Two Lines) March 2020. The 13th issue of Fiyah is unthemed, letting the stories come unfettered and showcasing several very new authors. The lead is “All That the Storm Took” by Yah Yah Scholfield, a harrowing tale of surviving hurricane Katrina. The structure is very interesting: first we

The Visual History of Science Fiction Fan­dom, Volume One: The 1930s, David Ritter & Daniel Ritter (First Fandom Experience 978-1-7332964-4-1, $150.00, 516pp, hc) Febru­ary 2020. Fandom may be a billion-dollar industry these days, and the field of fandom studies has drawn enough scholarly attention that it even has its own academic journal, so old-time SF fans might be excused a degree of smugness while claiming – not unreason­ably – that

The British Book Awards, or Nibbies, will hold a virtual awards ceremony on June 29, 2020. The original award ceremony, planned for May 18, 2020, was postponed due to disruption caused by the COVID-19 outbreak. 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,

The shortlist for the 2020 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, given by The Orwell Foundation to novels and short story collections published in the UK which explore major political and social themes through a fictional lens, includes three titles of genre interest. The Wall, John Lanchester (W. W. Norton & Company) The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead (Doubleday) Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo (Hamish Hamilton) The judges for 2020 are

Ghost Species, James Bradley (Hamish Hamilton 978-1-926-42866-6, AU$29.99, 320pp, tp), April 2020. REVIEW BY IAN MOND Back in February, Jeff Bezos earmarked ten bil­lion dollars for the establishment of the “Earth Fund.” He joins fellow billionaire philanthropists Michael Bloomberg and Bill and Melinda Gates in throwing large sums of money at the climate crisis. While it’s questionable whether these acts of rich-people tokenism will play any role in sav­ing the

The shortlist for the 2020 Encore Award, given by the Royal Society of Literature to the best second novel of the year, includes one title of genre interest. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the award, each of the four shortlisted authors will receive a £500 prize. Everything You Ever Wanted, Luiza Sauma (Viking) The judges for 2020 are Edmund Gordon, Nikita Lalwani, and Eley Williams. The winner of the

B. Sharise Moore won a $5,000 grant, one of several given to artists and writers around the world by the Sustainable Arts Foundation. Her debut novel, YA historical fantasy Dr. Marvellus Djinn’s Odd Scholars, is forthcoming from MVmedia. For more information, including the list of finalists and recipients, see the Sustainable Arts Foundation website. While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring

Larissa Lai, author of The Tiger Flu (Arsenal Pulp), won the $5,000 Jim Duggins Mid-Career Novelist prize, for “LGBTQ-identified authors who have published multiple novels, built a strong reputation and following, and show promise to continue publishing high quality work for years to come.” Judges were Brian Leung and Shani Mootoo. For more information, see the official announcement. While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a

John Joseph Adams will step down as editor of Nightmare magazine after issue #100 in January 2021, with with author and editor Wendy N. Wagner taking over. Adams will remain editor of Lightspeed and publisher of both magazines. Adams said: If you’re a diligent Nightmare reader, you’re already familiar with her editorial contributions: She was the guest editor for our Queers Destroy Horror! special issue back in 2015. But in

The Locus Bestsellers for May include top titles Agency by William Gibson, Storm Cursed by Patricia Briggs, The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski, and Star Trek: Picard: The Last Best Hope by Una McCormack.

Paladin’s Grace, T. Kingfisher (Red Wombat Studio, $5.99, 400pp, eb) February 2020. T. Kingfisher (the pseudonym that Hugo Award winning Ursula Vernon uses when writing for adults) works in a similar setting as K.J. Parker. Her world, like his, is full of commoners and princes and courtiers and tradespeople in an imagined pre-industrial past. Where Parker goes heavy on the engineering (with a little bit of hu­mor), Vernon goes heavy

Chinese SF writer Ye Yonglie, 79, died May 15, 2020 in Shanghai. He published over 50 books, including SF, children’s books, mysteries, and popular science. He was often called the “Chinese Isaac Asimov” for his prolific output of fiction and non-fiction. Ye Yonglie was born August 30, 1940 in Wenzhou, China. He began writing from a young age, with his first poem published at age 11, and attended Beijing University,

The Odyssey Writing Workshop has announced recipients of several of its scholarships available for students attending in 2020. Scott Gray won the Miskatonic Scholarship, funded by George R.R. Martin and covering full tuition and housing for a promising new writer of Lovecraftian cosmic horror. Vikram Ramakrishnan won the Walter & Kattie Metcalf Singing Spider Scholarship, funded by Pam Metcalf Harrington, covering full tuition for “a fantasy writer whose novel excerpt

The New York Public Library announced its five Young Lions Fiction Award finalists for 2020, which includes Bryan Washington’s Lot (Atlantic). The winner will be announced June 11, 2020. The $10,000 prize is awarded “each spring to a writer age 35 or younger for a novel or a collection of short stories” by a panel of judges. 2019’s winner was Ling Ma’s Severance (Farrar, Straus, Giroux). For more information, including

Bryan Washington’s Lot (Atlantic) is the winner of the 2020 International Dylan Thomas Prize, announced May 14. Inland by Téa Obreht (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) had also made the shortlist. The annual Dylan Thomas prize, in partnership with Swansea University, awards £30,000 “to the best published or produced literary work in the English language, written by an author aged 39 or under.” The judging panel was chaired by Professor Dai Smith

New books this week are by Suzanne Collins, Jessie Mihalik, Rowenna Miller, Christopher G. Nuttall, Shubhangi Swarup, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and Lesley Wheeler.

The Gravity of Us, Phil Stamper (Bloomsbury 978-1547600144, $17.99, 307pp, hc) February 2020. Set just slightly in the future, as the US trains astronauts for a mission to Mars, The Gravity of Us is a smart, heartwarming, and thoroughly relevant novel about teens swept up in the clashing ambitions of those around them. It brims with joy and drama, with a dose of treachery tossed in to keep the plot

Finalists for the 2020 Premio Kelvin 505 Awards, presented by the Celsius 232 festival and honoring “the best science fiction, fantasy or horror novels published in 2019” for the first time in Spain have been announced. Mejor Novela Original (Best Original Novel) Sigilo, Ismael Martínez Biurrun (Alianza) Nuestra parte de la noche, Mariana Enríquez (Anagrama) Mars Company, Francisco Miguel Espinosa (Aristas Martínez) El arcano y el jilguero, Ferran Varela (El Transbordador)

Winners have been announced for the 2020 Prix Imaginales, for “the best fantasy novels, and everything particularly fantasy, published the previous calendar year” in France. French Novel Danse avec les lutins, Catherine Dufour (L’Atalante) Foreign Novel Vita Nostra, Marina & Sergey Dyachenko (L’Atalante) YA Novel L’Estrange Malaventure de Mirella, Flore Vesco (L’École des loisirs) Illustration François Baranger for illustrations in Les Montagnes hallucinées 1 by H.P. Lovecraft (Bragelonne) Collection Chuchoteurs du

Suzanne Collins’ new Hunger Games novel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (Scholastic), to be published tomorrow, sits at or near the top of all three Amazon lists today.

Chelsea Louise Polk was born September 28, 1969 in New Westminster, British Columbia. She spent her childhood there and in Surrey BC before moving to Ed­monton at age 13 and then to Calgary at 21. She published a few pieces of short fiction beginning in the early 2000s as Chel­sea Polk. Her most recent story is “St. Valentine, St. Abigail, St. Brigid” at Tor.com (2/5/20). Polk’s debut novel Witchmark (2018)

Bone Silence, Alastair Reynolds (Gollancz 978-0575090675, $23.83, 496pp, hc) January 2020. With Bone Silence, Alastair Reynolds completes the far, far-future adventures of Arafura and Adrana Ness, a pair of nice girls who ran away from home to find ad­venture and got rather more than they expected. In Revenger it was crewing on a sunjamming, treasure-hunting spacecraft; pawing through caches of ancient lost technology in dangerous, widely scattered troves called “baubles”;

The winners of the 2019 British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Awards have been announced. Best Novel WINNER: Children of Ruin, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor) The Green Man’s Foe, Juliet E. McKenna (Wizard’s Tower) Atlas Alone, Emma Newman (Gollancz) Fleet of Knives, Gareth L. Powell (Titan) The Rosewater Insurrection, Tade Thompson (Orbit) Best Shorter Fiction WINNER: This is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone (Jo Fletcher) To

Masters of Science Fiction: Kate Wilhelm, Kate Wilhelm (Centipede Press 978-1-61347-207-1 and 978-1-61347-208-8, $95, 736 and 784 pages, hardcover) March 2020 Editor John Pelan and publisher Jerad Walters of Centipede Press have again conspired, as they do on an awesomely regular schedule, to produce a book—a two-volume set, actually—that is a masterpiece of curation and production values. A handsome, deluxe, high-quality package, priced sensibly, enshrining important stories—what more could you

LSC Communications, the largest book printer in the US, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in April. The company plans to continue operations “in the ordinary course” and says it will “pay vendors in full under customary terms for all goods and services received on or after the filing date.” They are negotiating with lenders to restructure financially, but are required to “conduct a marketing process for the sale of

The Border Keeper, Kerstin Hall; Mi­chael Braun, narrator (Recorded Books, $15.99, digital download, 5.25 hr., un­abridged) October 2019. The mortal man Vasethe is an unwelcome guest to the reclusive Border Keeper, the many-lived, dual-souled powerful woman who guards the boundaries that separate the human lands of Ahri from realms of gods, demons, the incarnated dead, and other strange beings. He begs her to help him find his dead lover, and

On April 1, 2020 Bertelsmann completed its $675 million purchase of the last 25% of Penguin Random House owned by Pearson. Ber­telsmann plans to simplify the board structure, and Pearson’s two seats on the board are expected to be replaced. PRH US CEO Madeline McIntosh wrote to staff with some rare good news: regular employees not otherwise eligible for bonuses will receive $856 following strong 2019 financial results. HarperCollins UK

Clarkesworld 2/20 Lightspeed 2/20 Big Echo 1/20 Tor.com 1/29, 2/5, 2/11, 2/19/20 February’s Clarkesworld starts off strongly with “Outer” by Hollis John Henry. It’s a chilling story of mutants in the Caribbean, the result of some kind of scientific mishap. It hearkens back to Van Vogt’s Slans as we follow one particular mutant who can both feel emotions of those nearby and also snuff out their lifeforces, but this story

Nominees for the This Is Horror Awards 2019 have been announced: Novel of the Year Carnivorous Lunar Activities, Max Booth III (Cinestate) The Dark Game, Jonathan Janz (Fiction Without Frontiers) The Reddening, Adam Nevill (Ritual Limited) Wilder Girls, Rory Power (Delacorte) The Bone Weaver’s Orchard, Sarah Read (Trepidatio) Novella of the Year Dear Laura, Gemma Amor (self-published) The Half-Freaks, Nicole Cushing (Grimscribe) The Pale White, Chad Lutzke (Crystal Lake) In

The African Speculative Fiction Society (ASFS) has announced the shortlist for the 2020 Nommo Awards, for speculative fiction by Africans living anywhere. Best Novel Sing Down the Stars, Nerine Dorman (Tafelberg) Triangulum, Masande Ntshanga (Penguin Random House South Africa/Two Dollar Radio) David Mogo, Godhunter, Suyi Davies Okungbowa (Abaddon) War Girls, Tochi Onyebuchi (Razorbill) The Old Drift, Namwali Serpell (Hogarth) Rosewater Insurrection, Tade Thompson (Orbit) Best Novella The Border Keeper, Kerstin

Jason Sizemore has announced that Apex magazine will relaunch in January 2021, on “a new bi-monthly publication schedule with one issue every two months for a total of six issues a year. The amount of yearly fiction published will remain the same as before, but this will allow for a more manageable production schedule of the zine.” He plans to run a subscription drive and a Kickstarter in July 2020 to

» The Conversation: Science fiction builds mental resiliency in young readers » New York Times: By the Book: The Science Fiction Writer John Scalzi Readily Quits Reading » Guardian: Eric Brown reviews Nick Martell, Hao Jingfang, Ian Whates, Breanna Teintze, Kat Dunn » Scott Edelman practices social distancing while answering 95 questions from George R.R. Martin, Sarah Pinsker, Greg Bossert, Barry N. Malzberg, Michael Dirda, and many others

The Vanished Birds, Simon Jimenez (Del Rey 978-0-593-12898-5, $27.00, 394pp, hc) January 2020. Simon Jimenez’s The Vanished Birds comes to us from Del Rey, with its long and distinguished SF/F history, but with a cover that pointedly eschews any suggestion of the space opera elements that are central to the novel’s action. The central character sees herself as something of a vagabond. Nia Imani is captain of a space freighter

The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) voted to accept active membership applications from comic and graphic novel writers. The decision was made by a membership-wide vote during the 2020 SFWA Officer Election. Specific dates and rules are yet to be announced. The voting results are available on the SFWA site. SFWA also voted to change the membership class name from “active member” to “full member.” For more

Interference, Sue Burke (Tor 978-1-250-3784-1, $27.99, 324pp, hc) October 2019. Sue Burke’s Interference picks up where her meditative Semiosis left off. After a brief opening chapter on Earth, she brings us back to the far-flung Pax Colony, which has come to a negotiated peace between its human colonists, its other alien species (the Glassmakers), and its sentient plant. Things are going about as well as can be expected on Pax.

French SF writer G.-J. Arnaud, 91, died April 26, 2020 at home in the Var in France. George-Camille Arnaud, who wrote as G.-J. Arnaud and Georges-Jean Arnaud, was born July 3, 1928 in Saint-Gilles-du-Gard, Camargue, France. Arnaud began his career writing mystery and thriller novels, producing at least 200 under his own name and various pseudonyms before turning to science fiction. He began publishing SF with Les Croisés de Mara [The

The Suicide Mothers by ’Pemi Aguda won the 2020 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award. The award “gives £10,000 to an unpublished writer to enable them to complete a first book.” Aguda’s novel “begins with a real wow moment and sustains momentum as it draws us into a world that is utterly contemporary yet has room for the mythic and the supernatural.” Judges for the 2020 award were Sarah Perry, Max

Bubblegum, Adam Levin (Doubleday Books 978-0-385-54496-2, $29.95, 784pp, hc) April 2020. Back in 2010, as part of McSweeney’s now lapsed “Book Release Club,” I was sent a copy of The Instructions by debut au­thor Adam Levin. Like everything published by McSweeney’s, the novel was a beautiful artefact, a bright red cover depicting multiple versions of a hooded boy reaching for a girl. It was also over 1,000 pages long, and

Josh: Well, theaters are still closed, and most of the movies we were scheduled to review have been pushed back to the end of the year or 2021. So instead we’ll talk about the many science fiction and fantasy shows available on streaming services! Arley: Some shows I’ve been watching, and enjoying, are The Expanse, Westworld, and Watchmen. Josh: Nice. I like The Boys, Tales from the Loop, and The

Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy, 71, died May 12, 2020 of a heart attack. She began her career in publishing in 1974, working in the subsidiary rights department at Random House, and rose to became associate publisher of the Random House imprint. In her long career she also served as publisher of Vintage Books, and was president and publisher of Avon. She joined S&S in 1992 as president of

New books listed this week are by W. Michael Gear, Jenna Glass, Christophe Lambert, Dan Moren, and Lawrence Wright.

Shadows & Tall Trees, Vol. 8, Michael Kelly, ed. (Undertow 978-1-988964-17-1, $27.99, 269pp, hc) March 2020. Shadows & Tall Trees, Vol. 8 lives up to the high standard previously set by editor Mi­chael Kelly with this series. The anthology’s 18 original stories serve as a good entry drug to the best in modern short fiction as well as reliable reads for those already addicted. Many tend toward the surreal. The

Finalists for the 11th annual Xingyun Awards for Chinese science fiction were announced by the World Chinese Science Fiction Association. Best Novel Memory Deviation, Wu Chu The Cosmic Egg, Wang Jinkang A Voyager in the Sea of Stars, A Que The Stars, Qi Yue Best Novella “Astronomical Priests”, Baoshu “Host”, Cheng Jingbo “The Algorithms for Life”, Chen Qiufan “Forget-Me-Not”, A Que Best Short Story “The Man Who Recedes into the

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder (Pantheon), and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Riverhead), are among the finalists for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards. The award was founded by Three Percent at the University of Rochester and awards $10,000 to be split by the author and translator of the winning titles. The fiction jury

The Lost Ones by Anita Frank (HQ) and The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern (Harvill Secker) are on the six-title shortlist for the Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award. The award was established in 2017 by independent bookstore Goldsboro Books for novels with “compelling storytelling with brilliant characterisation and a distinct voice that is confidently written and assuredly realised.” The winning title will be announced July 2, 2020 and the author

Shortlisted titles for the Gollancz and Rivers of London BAME SFF Award have been announced: “The Shape of the World”, Amy Borg “The Scent of Cloves”, Dan Buchanan “Kali’s Call”, Dolly Garland “The Reeves’ Guild”, Kyla Jardine “The Principles of Moments”, Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson “Nowhere more Changeable than the Mortal Heart”, Ewen Ma “Blood of the Wolf”, Jaya Martin “Seeds of Heaven”, Victor Ogana The award was launched in 2019 by

  Sarah Bear Elizabeth Wishnevsky was born September 22, 1971, in Hartford CT. She attended the University of Connecticut, where she studied English and anthropology, though she did not take a degree. She has worked as a technical writer, stable hand, reporter, and in assorted office jobs, and has been writing full-time since 2006. She married Christopher Kindred in 2000, divorcing in 2007. She became involved with fantasy writer and

Lawrence Wright’s pandemic thriller The End of October (Knopf) debuts on four lists. The complete L.A. Times list seems to have moved behind the paywall, though a shorter, hardcover-only list is in the sidebar of this page.

City of a Thousand Feelings, Anya Johanna DeNiro (Aqueduct) February 2020. Another entry in Aqueduct Press’s long and always challenging Conversation Pieces series. This is a novelette, City of a Thousand Feelings by Anya Johanna DeNiro, a trans woman whose work I’ve long liked and have missed. This story doesn’t quite work for me, but it’s fascinating and well written, with some spectacular imagery. It’s opens with two trans women,

Bookstores are still in dire shape, with the pandemic causing store closures all over. WH Smith in the UK reports that sales were down 25% in March, and in the first week of April they were down 85% over the same period in 2019. They predict similar losses through the end of August, then hope for “gradual improvement in trading through to the end of Decem­ber.” About 60% of their

Meat Cute, Gail Carriger; Emma Newman, narra­tor (self-published, $4.99, digital download, 1.25 hr., unabridged) January 2020. The website TV Tropes has coined the lovely term “noodle incident” to refer to a peculiar-sounding event that characters mention in a story but never fully explain. A classic example is Watson’s brief reference to the Giant Rat of Sumatra in the Sher­lock Holmes mysteries. Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate series has the “hedgehog incident,”

James Patterson extended his philan­thropy toward independent bookstores with a personal donation of half a million dollars to help stores impacted by coronavirus closures. The funds were administered by the Book Industry Charity Foundation, with money to be distributed by May 15, 2020. Patterson joined with the American Booksellers Association in the #SaveIndieBookstores fundraising campaign, which ran in April. The funds “will go toward helping hundreds of indie bookstores across

The Regrets, Amy Bonnaffons; Jay Ben Markson, Christie Moreau & Gary Tiedemann, narrators (Hachette Audio 978-1-47899966-9, $25.98, digital download, 6.75 hr., unabridged) February 2020. When Thomas was a boy, a mistaken encounter with an angel of death turned him into a thrill-seeker, flirt­ing with death out of a longing to see the angel again. When he finally gets his wish in a car accident, the afterlife bureaucracy determines that he

The 2020 Aurora Awards ballot has been announced. The Aurora Awards are nominated by members of the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association. The top five nominated works were selected, with additional works included when there was a tie for fifth place. Best Novel Haunting the Haunted, E.C. Bell (Tyche) The Gossamer Mage, Julie E. Czerneda (DAW) A Brightness Long Ago, Guy Gavriel Kay (Viking Canada) The Quantum Garden, Derek

The Chinese publishing company Future Af­fairs Administration (FAA) which, among other things, publishes the online Manda­rin-language SF magazine Non-Exist, recently celebrated the Lunar New Year with its Chinese New Year SF Gala. Lunar New Year is a couple of weeks of celebration in China, very focused on family and roots. For the last five years, FAA has been commissioning SF writers to create stories based on different themes. International authors

Luke Arnold, The Last Smile in Sunder City (Orbit US 978-0-316-45582-4, $15.99, 316pp, tp) February 2020. Fetch Phillips is a hard-boiled (or possibly well-pickled) detective type, working in a city that once ran on magic and hasn’t really recovered since the magic ran out in a devastating war. Being human, Fetch is less affected by the loss of magic than many of the supernatural races that used to run things,

The Science Fiction Fan Groups’ Association of Nippon (SFFAN) has announced the finalists for the 2020 Seiun Awards (the Japanese equivalent of the Hugo Awards), honoring the best original and translated works published last year in Japan. Best Translated Novel The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Becky Chambers, translated by Youko Hosomi (Tokyo Sogensha) The Paradox Men, Charles L. Harness, translated by Tohru Nakamura (Takeshobo) Jade City, Fonda

Aftershocks: The Palladium Wars, Marko Kloos (47North 978-1-5420-4355-7, $24.95, 282pp, hc) July 2019. In Aftershocks: The Palladium Wars, Marko Kloos is setting up a series that will look at what happens once a war is over. It’s a nice change from the smash and bang of what happens during the fighting; instead, here he puts the focus on the aftermath of occupation. Kloos opens on Aden Robertson, a Gretian soldier,