New Podcast: SF Encyclopedia: There is a new episode available on our podcast feed. In it, Cheryl Morgan talks to Graham Sleight about the newly launched Third Edition of the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, which was launched yesterday around the same time that iTunes was processing the podcast. Graham is the business manager for the enterprise. The encyclopedia is being written primarily by John Clute,
Alan Moore Interviewed: Irish fan, Pádraig Ó Méalóid, is an expert on the works of Alan Moore. The two talk often, and the results of their latest chat can be found online here. Moore talks about his new magazine, Dodgem Logic and various other new projects.
Horizontal Connections: 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
Our Staff Are Busy: Over on her personal blog, Spiral Galaxy, Karen Burnham has been talking about the short fiction she has been reading recently. Being an engineer by inclination, she has been keeping data, which you may find interesting. In addition Karen lists the various short fiction magazines that she is reading. If your magazine isn’t listed, please let her know. Also we
Heart of Darkness Reviewed: Those of you who enjoyed Sam Jordison’s exploration of Johanna Sinisalo’s Birdbrain and its relationship to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness might be interested in this review of the Conrad story by Larry Nolen.
Eclipse Four Table of Contents: Jonathan Strahan has posted the Table of Contents for the fourth volume of his critically acclaimed Eclipse anthology series. You can find the list of stories at his website.
NESFA Announces 4th Anderson Collection: NESFA Press has announced the publication of a fourth volume in its continuing series collecting the short fiction of Poul Anderson. It is named Admiralty after the lead story. The book has 508 pages and contains 23 stories. It is edited by Rick Katze, has an introduction by David G. Hartwell and a cover by John Picacio. For further details
Call for Interstitial Criticism: Over at the Interstitial Arts Foundation Delia Sherman and Helen Pilinovsky are launching what they describe as a “rolling online anthology of interstitial criticism on interstitial texts”. One essay of between 750 to 3500 words will be published each month. Payment will be “a $25 honorarium per essay for non-exclusive world anthology rights.” For full details including how to submit
Can science fiction be literature?: YES. Next question? That was especially for you, Charlie Jane Anders. Meanwhile, for everyone else, Damien G. Walter has made another assault on the Booker Prize over at The Guardian.
A Cabinet of Curiosities: Jeff VanderMeer has announced the table of contents for the forthcoming The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities. It promises to be even more weird and wonderful as the now legendary Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases.
Sean Wallace to Edit Steampunk Anthology: Sean Wallace, the owner of Prime Books and former fiction editor at Clarkesworld, will edit the forthcoming Mammoth Book of Steampunk. Submissions guidelines are available on Sean’s LiveJournal.
StarShipSofa Announces Writers Workshop: The popular podcast, StarShipSofa, will be running an online SF&F writers workshop in March. The tutors will be Michael Swanwick, James Patrick Kelly, Sheila Williams, Gregory Frost and David Mercurio Rivera. That’s a very impressive list. The cost is £30 up until Feb. 27th and £35 thereafter. Further details here, and sign-up here.
Weird Tales Increases Pay Rates: Editor Ann VanderMeer has announced that Weird Tales will now pay 5c/word for their fiction. The magazine has also revamped its website and adopted the famous Clarkesworld online submission management system. The full press release is available here.
Maura on Shadoweyes: Following our podcast discussion for issue #5 Maura McHugh ordered a copy of Ross Campbell’s Shadoweyes. She reviewed it on her blog. I ordered a copy as well, and I’m happy to confirm Maura’s opinion.
Chadbourn Gets Historical: Author Mark Chabourn is planning a series of posts on writing historical fantasy. The first one is here. It looks like it could be an interesting series.
Colin Harvey To Edit New Anthology: Colin Harvey will be editing a new anthology for the Irish company, Aeon Press. Transtories will be “a collection of original stories based on, developed from or including any word from the dictionary prefixed by ‘trans;’”. The submission period begins on March 1st and closes on March 31st. Full details at the Aeon website.
Guardian on SF&F Covers: Today’s Guardian Book Blog features a post by Damien G. Walter in which he implores readers not to be put off by the gaudy, and sometimes frankly awful, covers used on speculative fiction books. Examples of fine writers he says can be found behind lurid covers include JG Ballard, Kim Newman and Jon Courtenay Grimwood. (It sounds like some smart
VanderMeer Gets Musical: Jeff VanderMeer is one of those writers who loves to have a soundtrack to his writing. Today the music blog, Largehearted Boy, has a feature by Jeff in which he talks about the musical inspiration for his collection, The Third Bear.
Peter Crowther Becomes Angry Robot: The boss of PS Publishing is making a new foray into writing with the Forever Twilight trilogy of “apocalyptic science fiction novels”. Yes, that’s during the apocalypse, not post-it. Angry Robot books has signed him up. More details from their website.
Conrad’s SF Novel: When he was researching his review of Johanna Sinisalo’s Birdbrain, Sam Jordison discovered that Joseph Conrad had co-authored a science fiction novel with Ford Madox Ford. Sam was intrigued, and tracked down the book, The Inheritors. His review of it has just gone up at The Guardian.
Another Award for Bacigalupi: Our sister site, SF Awards Watch, has just reported that Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker has won the prestigious Printz Award from the American Library Association. Further details here.
Angry Robot signs Trent Jamieson: 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.
50% Off Sale at Night Shade: 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
Gary & Jonathan Talk Reviews: In the latest episode of the wonderful “Live with Gary K. Wolfe!” podcast, Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe talk about what they are looking for in writing about books. If you want to know the sort of thing that I’m looking for as regards submissions to Salon Futura, go and listen to them. They have nailed it.
New Solaris Catalogue: 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.
January Magazines Available: The January ebook editions of Clarkesworld and Lightspeed are now available in the Wizard’s Tower bookstore.
Welcome, Locus Digital: 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
Orbit UK Catalogue: Orbit UK has emailed us with a link to their 2011 catalogue. You can find it here (along with Little Brown’s other imprints). Highlights for me include Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s venture into vampire-ridden Venice, a new fantasy series from Daniel Abraham, and Deadline, the sequel to Mira Grant’s wonderful FEED. It is also good to see them picking up authors
Gaiman, Rushdie and Byatt on Magic: 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
Brazilian Steampunk Online: 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.
Clarke Award Open Letter: Tom Hunter, the current Clarke Award Administrator, has published an open letter on the Torque Control blog asking for feedback on the future of the award. You can add your comments here.
Nnedi on the BBC: Nnedi Okorafor, who was a guest on our first ever podcast, has recently been on a radio show produced by the BBC World Series. The Forum is very much like a panel discussion podcast, but with very diverse guests. Nnedi’s episode also included an expert on stress who wants hospitals redesigned to make them more welcoming, and an ecologist who
Guardian Best of the Year: Today’s Guardian contains a round up of the favorite books of 2010 by a variety of the newspaper’s regular contributors. Our own Sam Jordison picked Birdbrain, by Finnish author Johanna Sinisalo. You’ll find out why when our issue #4 goes online. Meanwhile the paper’s SF reviewer, Eric Brown, picked Horns by Joe Hill, and blogger Damien G. Walter picked Kraken
Congratulations, Karen!: Our short fiction reviewer, Karen Burnham, is about to take up a prestigious new post as editor of the Locus Roundtable blog. The official announcement is here. We look forward to seeing what she does with the blog.
Locus To Go Digital: Locus magazine has announced that, as of January 2011, it will be available in ebook format. The launch will be accompanied by a “Digital Age” special issue that includes contributions from many people involved in online publishing, including me.
Clute Podcasts: The weekly podcast discussions between Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe are one of the highlights of my weekends. This week’s episode was even more special: both in general, because John Clute was a guest contributor, and for me personally as I also got to participate. You can listen to the podcast here, and I talk a bit about some
Women in SF Week: At the Torque Control blog Niall Harrison is devoting the entire week to discussing women SF writers. He explains about it here, including discussion of the poll to discover the top ten SF books by women in the last decade. The countdown of the results begins here with two very fine books.
New Tor Catalog: Tor, one of the most prolific publishers of science fiction in the world, has recently released a new catalog covering the period Spring/Summer 2011. You can find it online here (pdf). If covers are anything to go by, they expect great things from the US release in May of The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi. In the UK Gollancz has
Guardian on SF (Again): The Guardian is continuing to dip its toes into the waters of speculative fiction, with mixed degrees of success. Discussions of SF in the mainstream media are often most interesting for the ways in which the commentators limit their view of it so as to be able to dismiss it as bad. Margaret Atwood famously described science fiction as being
Umanosuke Iida 1961-2010: It is turning out to be a bad year for anime creators. Jonathan Clements has an obituary for Umanosuke Iida over at Schoolgirl Milky Crisis.