Seattle Worldcon 2025 has announced a short story writing contest with separate categories for adult and young adult writers.
The winners in each category will be recognized at the convention, receive free memberships to the convention, and have their stories published in an upcoming anthology by Grim Oak Press. Stories must draw inspiration from our Worldcon theme: Building Yesterday’s Future – For Everyone.
The theme “was selected to invoke nostalgia
VIDA CRUZ-BORJA is now represented by Stevie Finegan of Zeno Agency Ltd.
SCOTT WESTERFELD & JUSTINE LARBALESTIER sold adult novel The Mortons – “The Secret History meets The Sopranos meets Saltburn,” – and a second book to Jeramie Orton at Pamela Dorman Books at auction via Jill Grinberg of Jill Grinberg Literary Management. UK rights sold to Rosa Schierenberg at Viking UK in a ...Read More
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The Jaguar Mask, Michael J. DeLuca (Stelliform 978-1-77809-260-2, 348pp, $19.00, tp) August 2024. Cover by Julia Louise Pereira.
The story of The Jaguar Mask does not start on the first page, in which the artist Cristina Ramos relives the murder of her mother in a garish vision – four tattooed mareros with machine pistols, haloed by angels of death, gunning down two government employees, a foreign lobbyist, and Eufemia ...Read More
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The winners of the 2024 Prix Utopiales and the 2024 Prix Utopiales Jeunesse have been announced. The prizes recognize work in the fantastic genres published or translated into French.
Prix Utopiales (Adult Literature)
The Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association has announced the winners of its annual prize for poetry. Poems were judged in three categories, listed below.
Dwarf Category (10 or fewer lines):
Strange Horizons has announced the launch of a year-long podcast series, SH@25, in celebration of their 25th anniversary.
SH@25 will feature “interviews with authors, artists, poets, and former staff of Strange Horizons, charting the magazine’s 25 year trajectory from being founded in September 2000 to winning a Hugo in August 2024, as well as looking ahead at its future.” The project will be led by podcast editor Kat Kourbeti and ...Read More
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The British Fantasy Society (BFS) has announced the winners of the 2024 British Fantasy Awards.
Best Fantasy Novel (the Robert Holdstock Award)
Best Horror Novel (the August Derleth
ANANDA FERNANDES LIMA was born in Brasília, Brazil, and grew up there. She attended high school in Australia for a year through an exchange program and returned there for her undergraduate degree. While in college, she did a year abroad in Los Angeles and later moved back to attend grad school at UCLA, where she earned her MA in linguistics. She met her husband there, and they later lived in ...Read More
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Napalm in the Heart, Pol Guasch (Faber & Faber UK 978-0571375257, £6.99, 256pp, hc) July 2024. (FSG Originals 978-0-37461-295-5, $18.00, 256pp, tp) August 2024.
Reading Pol Guasch’s debut, Napalm in the Heart, right after Helen Phillips’ Hum is a disorientating experience. Both authors present us with dystopias, but while Phillips cleaves to our reality, Guasch gives us something more symbolic and experimental, a dystopia unmoored from time and ...Read More
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The Dark 6/24 Uncanny 7-8/24 Apex #145 Weird Horror Fall ’24
The Dark #109 features two originals. “The Abandoned” by Jack Klausner is a haunting story that begins with a little girl finding a box in the schoolyard. It takes us through tragic mystery and ends in resignation. The protagonist in Beth Goder’s interesting “Labyrinth” visits the infamous Winchester Mystery House in a story that ...Read More
Read moreLongtime Barnes & Noble head LEONARD RIGGIO, 83, died August 27, 2024 in Manhattan. He had Alzheimer’s.
Leonard Stephen Riggio was born February 28, 1941 in New York, and attended Brooklyn Technical High School. After graduating in 1958, he took night classes at NYU for a while before dropping out. He founded a small bookshop, the Student Book Exchange, in 1965. In 1971, he purchased New York bookshop Barnes ...Read More
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Your Shadow Half Remains, Sunny Moraine (Nightfire 978-1-25089-220-1, $16.99, 176pp, tp) February 2024.
If you look at someone, you’re dead. Not just dead, but dead in some horrible, violent way. That’s the premise at the core of Sunny Moraine’s Your Shadow Half Remains. Yes, readers familiar with Josh Malerman’s Bird Box may see a similarity to that novel in that premise, but Your Shadow Half Remains is very different, ...Read More
Read moreWriter and publishing professional Zoe Kaplan, 28, died October 9, 2024 of complications from diabetes.
Kaplan began publishing short fiction of genre interest with “Pink Marble” in 2021, and published several other stories in magazines and anthologies. She also worked in publishing, spending time at Tor before joining Simon & Schuster in 2021, first as a member of the production team, and later as a managing editorial associate, working extensively ...Read More
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Results of the 25th Fantastiknovelltävlingen, a Swedish “Fantastic Short Story Competition” organized by writers’ email list SKRIVA, have been announced.
First Place
Second Place
Third Place
Honorable Mentions
Winners were awarded prizes including cash, shares
Flash Fiction Online 6/24 Strange Horizons 6/9/24, 6/24/24 Beneath Ceaseless Skies 6/27/24, 7/11/24
The June Flash Fiction Online features a range of rather grim stories about characters caught in oppressive situations. Perhaps the most surprising is Kurt Pankau’s “A Pin Drops”, which imagines bowling technology advancing to the point where pins are made intelligent and sentient in order for them to protect one another and form familial ...Read More
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Glasgow 2024, the 82nd World Science Fiction Convention, received 3,436 valid ballots (3,431 electronic, five paper), up from 1,674 at Chengdu Worldcon. There were an additional 377 ballots disqualified as fraudulent or ‘‘not cast by natural persons.’’ There were 1,720 nominating ballots (1,715 electronic, five paper), down from 1,847.
The procedure for counting nominations remains the E Pluribus Hugo, or EPH, system. The rather complicated system gives a single point ...Read More
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Looking to add to your TBR pile? Come by and watch this weeks new video on the top new releases! We’ve got a fantastic collection of Fantasy, SF, and Horror books for you to have a look at! Don’t forget to Like and Subscribe to support what we do!
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South Korean author Han Kang has won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” Her novel The Vegetarian was the first Korean language book to win the International Booker Award. The 2024 prize amount is 11 million Swedish kronor, just over $1 million US.
For more information, see the Nobel Prize website.
While you are ...Read More
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The Deadlands Spring ’24
“The Slave Boy” by Denzel Xavier Scott in the Spring 2024 issue of The Deadlands looks at different forms of captivity and freedom. A young boy contemplates his own imprisonment and the imprisonment of the talking animals he’s forced to care for, pitying them, but also resenting them and the way they mock and torment him. He meets a strange man who offers him ...Read More
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Scientific American published a list of “Science-Fiction Books Scientific American’s Staff Love.”
“Top Shelf Recommendations” include The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, Contact by Carl Sagan, The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin, and series The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells.
There are a number of other categories featuring works of genre interest, including “Ghastly Thrillers” and “All’s Fair In Love, War And Time Travel.”
For the complete
The United Nations bookshop, located in the Visitors Concourse of the United Nations in the General Assembly Building, held a one-hour “meet the author” event featuring Kim Stanley Robinson on September 21, 2024.
Robinson read from The Ministry for the Future and the following Q&A was moderated by Nanette Braun, director of Public Information at the Department of Global Communications.
The bookshop offers “the latest books published by and about ...Read More
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Joker: Folie à Deux starring Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga follows up the 2019 smash hit Joker. The film was easily one of the most anticipated movies of 2024, which automatically puts it at a disadvantage when trying to meet the audience’s expectations. However, Joker: Folie à Deux just might be a prime example of why studios need to rethink their current approach to filmmaking when a film that should ...Read More
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The 2024 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards have been announced. The Science Fiction & Fantasy category winner was a three-way tie: Guardians of the High Pass by Avery Christy (Well Read Coyote), Magical Mushrooms by Kris Neri (Well Read Coyote), and Oceana by E J Randolph (Well Read Coyote).
The award mission is “uncovering and honoring the best in Arizona and New Mexico books.” Each book is judged by members of ...Read More
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Matthew Reardon, AKA JRH Lawless, has withdrawn his candidacy for secretary of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) special election. While there are now no official candidates, Steven D. Brewer is a write-in candidate for the position.
SFWA is holding the special election for president and secretary following the resignations of president Jeffe Kennedy and vice-president Chelsea Mueller, among others. Secretary Anthony W. Eichenlaub is currently interim president. ...Read More
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Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil, Ananda Lima (Tor 978-1-25029-297-1, 192pp, $24.99, hc) Cover by Jamie Stafford-Hill. June 2024.
Ananda Lima’s Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is pleasingly hard to classify. One could take the easy route and call it a debut collection – and an exciting one, to be sure, an excellent mix of stories magical, speculative, and wholly grounded. But there’s reason to think ...Read More
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The 2024 Australasian Shadows Awards (previously known as the Australia Shadows Awards) winners were presented at Conflux in Canberra on October 7, 2024.
The award is given by the Australasian Horror Writers Association (AHWA) for “the finest in horror and dark fiction published by an Australasian within the calendar year.”
Novel
BizarroCon has announced the finalists for the 2024 Wonderland Book Awards for Excellence in Bizarro Fiction.
Best Novel
Best Collection
The winners for the 2024 Ditmar Awards for Australian SF have been announced.
Best Novel
Best Novella or Novelette
Cinderwich, Cherie Priest (Apex Book Company 978-1-955-76520-6, $21.95, 162pp, tp) May 2024.
Cherie Priest’s novella Cinderwich gifts readers with a bit of a haunted tree folktale, some true crime detecting, a frustrated ghost, and a couple of academic ladies with a sometimes prickly friendship who are more than willing to sit through countless diner dinners to get to a much-needed truth. In other words, it’s catnip for readers who ...Read More
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Sarah Guan announced via social media that she has left her position as publisher of Erewhon Books. Guan said:
Over my five years at Erewhon, we championed a diverse list of award winners and finalists, bestsellers, and Indie Next picks who garnered rave reviews from national and international media…. While I will dearly miss working with our amazing authors — and will always cheer for their success — I leave ...Read More
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The Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) has announced the winners of the 2024 Elgin Awards, presented for the best poetry chapbook and the best full-length poetry book in the speculative genre. The Elgin Awards are named after the founder of SFPA, Suzette Haden Elgin.
Hum, Helen Phillips (Marysue Rucci Books 978-1-66800-883-6, $27.99, 272pp, hc) August 2024.
The novels I review for this column are not chosen with a theme in mind. If one does pop up, it’s purely coincidental. That goes for this month. I had no idea Hum, Napalm in the Heart, and Ultra 85 would all be dystopian novels. The good news is that they’re very different in tone, ...Read More
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