August Derleth Park in Sauk City WI (where the author was born in 1909 and died in 1971) is being renamed to Sauk City Riverfont Park. The Sauk City Village Board voted 6-1 for the name change in August 2018, but the change is now drawing outcry from Derleth’s fans and family.
Jon Caflisch of the August Derleth Society (based in Sauk City) says the park is well known in ...Read More
Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Marlon James (Riverhead 978-0-7352-2017-1, $30.00, 640pp, hc) February 2019.
Novelists who approach genre materials after having been more or less certified as “literary” writers tend to start by revisiting fairly familiar territory – zombie apocalypses (Colson Whitehead), vampires (Justin Cronin), drizzly dystopias (just about everyone else). Marlon James, with his Man Booker Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings and several other prominent nominations, ...Read More
The Raven Tower, Ann Leckie (Orbit 978-0-316-38869-6, $26.00, 432pp, hc) February 2019.
You likely know Ann Leckie from her multi-award winning books set in the Ancillary Justice universe. These books took a sub-genre we know well – space opera – and told it slant. Yes, the tales spanned galaxies and generations, but her vision filtered these hoary old tropes into something fresh by focusing on gender and identity, while ...Read More
The Migration, Helen Marshall (Random House Canada 978-0-735-27262-0, C$24.99, 304pp, tp) March 2019. (Titan 978-1789091342, £8.99, 288pp, tp) March 2019.
I became aware of Helen Marshall through her short fiction, particularly her stunning debut collection Hair Side, Flesh Side. The stories, laid out like the body of an angel (thanks to Kirstyn McDermott for pointing that out to me), pull off the difficult feat of combining the emotionally ...Read More
The Wicked King, Holly Black (Little, Brown 978-0-316-31035-2, $18.99, 324pp, hc) January 2019.
Holly Black’s highly anticipated sequel to her outstanding The Cruel Prince has arrived and somehow, she manages to put even more intrigue and tension into this second volume. The Wicked King picks up a few months after the first book’s stunner of an ending, (and get ready – she packs that same cliffhanger punch with this ...Read More
Analog 1-2/19
Asimov’s 1-2/19
Amazing Winter ’18
Longshot Island 2/18
Analog opens 2019 with a varied set of stories that include some striking and unusual work. For example “Love in the Time of Immuno-Sharing” by Andy Dudak is set in a future city-state (of sorts), the Moveable Feast, in which sexual fashions turn on mingling disease profiles, with the notion of increasing everyone’s resistance. “Repro-sex” is frowned upon. ...Read More
Uncanny 11-12/18
Shimmer 11/18
Nightmare 1/19
Apex 11/18, 12/18
The Dark 12/18
Not all of the stories in Uncanny #25 are dark, but – oh well. The standout story for #25 is Naomi Kritzer‘s novelette “The Thing About Ghost Stories“. Leah’s doctoral dissertation is on the meaning of ghost stories. She gains an academic position just as her mother is descending into dementia. After the mother’s death, ...Read More
Apex magazine will go on indefinite hiatus following its 120th issue, after ten years of publication. Its last issue will be the Afrofuturism issue guest edited by Maurice Broaddus.
Publisher and editor-in-chief Jason Sizemore said:
One thing that became obvious to me is that I was neglecting both myself and the book side of Apex. I need to take time to exercise, take some time for my health, do more ...Read More
The Baltimore Science Fiction Society (BSFS) has announced the winner of the 2019 Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Award:
The award honors the best ...Read More
The shortlist for the 2019 Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, honoring the best SF/F work published in France in 2018, has been announced:
French Novel
Finalists for the 2019 Sir Julius Vogel Awards have been announced by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Association of New Zealand (SFFANZ). Winners will be selected by members of SFFANZ and GeyserCon 2019, and honored at the convention, May 31 – June 2, 2019 at the Holiday Inn Rotorua in Rotorua, New Zealand.
Best Novel
Winners for the 2018 Kitschies, awarded to “the year’s most progressive, intelligent and entertaining science fiction,” have been announced.
The Red Tentacle (Novel)
The Golden Tentacle (Debut)
Nominees for the This Is Horror Awards 2018 have been announced:
Novel of the Year
Novella of the Year
The 2019 Ditmar Award preliminary ballot for Australian SF has been announced:
Best Novel
Best Novella or Novelette
Grand Master Gene Wolfe, 87, died April 14, 2019 after a long struggle with heart disease. Wolfe was famed for his ambitious, challenging, and enthralling novels and stories, most famously the Book of the New Sun series.
Gene Rodman Wolfe was born May 7, 1931 in Brooklyn NY and grew up in Texas, where he attended Texas A&M and the University of Houston, graduating from the latter in 1956 with ...Read More
Trial by Treason, Dave Duncan (Night Shade Books 978-1-59780-954-2, $24.99, 285 pp, hc) October 2018. Cover by Steven Youll.
Trial by Treason is the second in a series of historical fantasy novels. Duncan, who died last year, was a steady, reliable writer: his stories filled a comfortable niche, and this book is no exception. He completed the third volume, Merlin Redux, before his death, and it’s expected this ...Read More
Editor Arthur A. Levine has left Scholastic after 23 years to launch his own independent publishing company, effective March 30, 2019. Levine’s eponymous imprint was founded in 1996, and he is a major figure in children’s publishing, best known for bringing J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series to the US.
Levine told Publishers Weekly, “I’ve had a wonderful run at Scholastic and will greatly miss working here. There are such ...Read More
A Bad Deal for the Whole Galaxy, Alex White (Orbit 978-0-316-41210-0, $15.99, 532pp, tp) December 2018. Cover by Lisa Marie Pompilio.
Alex White kicked off a rip-roaring (if you’ll pardon a hoary expression) space opera series in A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe in summer 2018. In December, he followed up with A Bad Deal for the Whole Galaxy, a new instalment in this inventively ...Read More
Writer and astronomy professor Andre W Fraknoi was awarded the 2019 Space Educator: Lifetime Achievement Award, presented March 22 in Washington DC at the 62nd Annual Robert Goddard Memorial Dinner. Fraknoi teaches at the Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning at the University of San Francisco.
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 ...Read More
Infinite Detail, Tim Maughan (MCD x FSG Originals 978-0-374-17541-2, $16.00, 384pp, tp) March 2019.
Tim Maughan first came to my attention with his 2011 collection Paintwork. The slim book featured three stories involving bleeding-edge technologies like augmented reality told from an outsider’s perspective: a street artist in Bristol, gamers in Cuba, an out-of-work documentary film-maker. In 2016 Maughan wrote the short-film In the Robot Skies (directed by Liam ...Read More
The 2020 Vilcek Prizes for Creative Promise in Literature, honoring “emerging to mid-career immigrant professionals who have demonstrated significant accomplishments early in their careers,” are open to writers in fiction, non-fiction, and poetry categories. Each winner will receive $50,000. Applicants should have published at least one full-length book (self-published work is ineligible), been born outside the US, and be 38 years of age or younger. Applications are due by June ...Read More
The Horror Writers Association (HWA) has announced Gollancz deputy publisher Gillian Redfearn as Editor Guest of Honour, joining previously announced Mistress of Ceremonies AK Benedict, for StokerCon UK, to be held April 16-19, 2020 at the Royal and Grand Hotels in Scarborough, UK.
For more information, see the StokerCon UK website.
While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely ...Read More
Tor Books is launching a new horror imprint, Nightfire, with Fritz Foy as publisher and additional staff to be added.
According to the announcement:
Under the Nightfire imprint, editors will acquire and publish across the breadth of the genre—from short story collections to novellas and novels, from standalone works to series, from dark fantasy to the supernatural, from originals to reprints of lost modern classics. In addition to publishing books ...Read More
Fiyah Autumn ’18
Deep Magic Fall ’18
Daily SF 11/28/18, 12/12/18, 12/14/18
Tor.com 10/24/18, 11/14/18
Abyss & Apex 4th Quarter 2018
The theme for the eighth issue of Fiyah is Pilgrimage, which is expressed in several different ways. “BULLET” by Stephen Kearse gives us the pilot of a weapon traveling across space for hundreds of days, giving her plenty of time to think about her mission and about ...Read More
Authors Edward Carey, Michael Helm, Carmen Maria Machado, and Luis Alberto Urrea are among the 2019 Guggenheim Fellows, announced April 10, 2019 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Fellowships were awarded to 168 recipients across 49 fields of study “on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.”
The Foundation was started in 1925 and has awarded grants totaling more than $360 million. Fellowships are through two annual competitions: ...Read More
Zero Sum Game, S.L. Huang (Self-published 978-0-996-07003-4, $12.95, 326pp, tp) March 2014. (Tor 978-1-250-18025-4, $25.99, 336pp, hc) October 2018.
Cas Russell uses her more-than-human math skills to find lost things in S.L. Huang’s Zero Sum Game. Those skills are tested when Russell finds herself rescuing a client’s sister who has gotten kidnapped (sort of) by a gang of drug dealers. Huang smartly starts in media res – that ...Read More
Kevin Hearne, ed., Death & Honey (Subterranean Press 978-1-59606-914-5, $45.00, 300pp, hc) February 2019. Cover by Galen Dara.
Murder and bees make an interesting topic for this original anthology of three fantasy novellas by Kevin Hearne, Lila Bowen (Delilah S. Dawson), and Chuck Wendig, each writing in their own popular worlds. Hearne offers “The Buzz Kill”, a peculiarly sweet and funny new tale in the Oberon’s Meaty Mysteries series, a ...Read More
