Author: Staff

Jonathan McCalmont has a bi-weekly gig posting links to interesting pieces of spec-fic related literary criticism that he has found around the Internet. In his latest column he is kind enough to mention us, but he also links to many other articles that are worth your attention. Our thanks to Jonathan for providing this valuable service so that we don’t have to.

Angry Robot Books announced today that they have signed Australian author, Trent Jamieson to produce a series of “steampunk-tinged fantasy novels”. Jamieson is already publishing an urban fantasy series with Orbit, the first book of which, Death Most Definite, will be featured in our next issue.

There’s a big sale on at Night Shade Books, one of the best SF&F small presses around. You have to order four books to qualify, but they have plenty of good material available, including Catherynne M. Valente’s The Habitation of the Blessed, which we reviewed last issue. Some of their forthcoming books are included in the sale as well, and we’ll be talking about some of those in our new issue due online next week. You have until midnight on January 23rd to place your order.

We have seen some concern on Twitter following on from Night Shade’s well-publicized financial problems last year. Jonathan Strahan, who does quite a few books with them, responded that things seem to be getting better and money is starting to flow to authors.

Solaris Books and their sister company, Abaddon, have produced their 2011 catalogue. You can find it online here. Highlights for us include new books by our friends Juliet E. McKenna and Gareth L. Powell.

The January ebook editions of Clarkesworld and Lightspeed are now available in the Wizard’s Tower bookstore.

Locus magazine has celebrated its 600th issue by going digital. The ebook subscription, which costs $48/year, gives you access to EPUB (iPad), MOBI (Kindle) and PDF versions of the magazine. It looks great on an iPad, and means that subscribers outside North America can get the latest issue hot off the presses.

Issue #600 contains a long section on science fiction in the digital age, with contributions from many industry luminaries, including Neil Gaiman, Cory Doctorow and even our editor, Cheryl Morgan.

Congratulations are also due to our short fiction columnist, Karen Burnham, who has begun her tenure as editor of the Locus Roundtable blog.

Via Neil Gaiman’s Twitter feed we learned of a broadcast on Wisconsin Public Radio entitled “The Uses of Enchantment.” Being mainstream journalism, it starts with a long interview with someone who believes that fairies are real, but the rest of the program is taken up with interviews with Gaiman, Salman Rushdie and A.S Byatt on why they use magic in their fiction. It is good stuff, and especially interesting in that Rushdie has very similar ideas about old deities to those that Gaiman uses in American Gods. You can listen to it here.

The translated samples from the Brazilian steampunk anthology, Vaporpunk, that Jeff VanderMeer mentioned in the latest Salon podcast are now available online at Beyond Victoriana.