Brazilian illustrator JOSÉ LUIZ BENÍCIO DA FONSECA, who worked as Benício, 84, died December 7, 2021 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Born September 14, 1936 in Rio Pardo, in the Brazilian South, he was a nationwide name in the fields of pulp art, pin-up art, movie posters, and advertisements.
After a stint plying piano for a radio show in Porto Alegre when he was only 15, Benício initially dedicated ...Read More
The New Yorker 10/11/21 Tales the Devil Told Me, Jen Fawkes (Press 53) October 2021.
Karen Russell offers a brilliant piece of SF (or fantasy, or, really, a beautiful example of how a purely fantastical insertion can illuminate an essentially SFnal premise) in the October 11th issue of The New Yorker. “The Ghost Birds” is set a few decades in the future, a future ravaged by climate change ...Read More
A Girl Called Rumi, Ari Honarvar (Forest Avenue Press 978-1-942436-46-1, $16.00, 362pp, tp) September 2021. Cover by Ari Honarvar.
Content warning: self-harm.
Ari Honarvar’s debut novel, A Girl Called Rumi, is a sage, beautifully-written fantasy novel. Against the intense backdrop of the Iran-Iraq war and eventual Green Uprising, Kimia uses storytelling to escape, and discovers a storyteller that will lead her through the Seven Valleys of Love – an ...Read More
Invisible Sun, Charles Stross (Tor 978-1-250-80709-0, $27.99, 285 pp, hc) September 2021. Cover by Neil Lang.
Partway into Charles Stross’s Invisible Sun, a harried intelligence/security chief says, “We’ve got a lot of balls in the air,” a condition that might apply as well to a number of his fellow characters and to Stross himself in his authorial role. This ninth and final entry in what is now called ...Read More
Within These Wicked Walls, Lauren Blackwood (Wednesday Books 978-1-250-78710-1, $18.99, hc 336pp) November 2021.
The publicity materials for Lauren Blackwood’s Within These Wicked Walls describe the book as an “Ethiopian-inspired debut retelling of Jane Eyre.” If you aren’t a fan of Charlotte Bronte’s classic this might put you off the book, whereas, if you are a fan, you might be instantly concerned that the marketing machine is overreaching. ...Read More
Beneath Ceaseless Skies 10/7/21 Clarkesworld 10/21 Tor.com 9/8, 9/15, 9/29, 10/13, 10/20/21 Strange Horizons 9/13/21
Beneath Ceaseless Skies is a strong, high-quality venue, week in and week out, but on anniversaries and big milestones editor Scott Andrews pulls out the stops. For the 13th Anniversary we get a double issue filled with magic. First up is “The Burning Girl” by Carrie Vaughn, an alternate history in which ...Read More
F&SF 11-12/21 Cossmass Infinities 9/21 Fusion Fragment 9/21
F&SF’s final 2021 issue is at hand. The marquee name is Nalo Hopkinson, the newest SFWA Grand Master, with her first appearance in the magazine. (One result of new editor Sheree Renee Thomas taking the helm has been lots of first appearances.) “Broad Dutty Water: A Sunken Story” is an example of “cli-fi,” but a science fiction writer’s approach ...Read More
The Mystery Writers of America (MWA) announced several awards.
Laurie R. King has been named Grand Master, which “represents the pinnacle of achievement in mystery writing and was established to acknowledge important contributions to this genre, as well as for a body of work that is both significant and of consistent high quality.”
Reviewer Lesa Holstine won the 2022 Raven Award, which “recognizes outstanding achievement in the mystery field outside ...Read More
The 2022 Philip K. Dick Award finalists have been announced:
The award is presented annually to a distinguished work of science fiction originally published in paperback form in the United States. The
Author and conrunner Jane E. Hawkins, 70, died January 7, 2022 in Seattle WA. Best known as a convention organizer, she also wrote gaming tie-in novel Quantum Gate (1996).
Jane Emily Hawkins was born March 11, 1951 in Davenport IA and showed an early aptitude for advanced mathematics. She attended Case University as part of the first engineering class to admit women, and worked at Bell Labs in computing. She ...Read More
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has announced the 2022 Creative Writing Fellows, winners of the Literature Fellowships in Creative Writing which “provides $25,000 grants to published creative writers that enable the recipients to set aside time for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement.”
This year’s recipients of genre interest include:
Ellen Datlow is accepting submissions for her 15th The Best Horror of the Year anthology, to be published by Night Shade Books and covering material appearing in 2022.
I am looking for stories and poetry from all branches of horror: supernatural, uncanny, sf horror, psychological, dark crime, terror tales, or anything else that might qualify. This is an all reprint anthology, so I’ll only consider material published in 2022. Deadline ...Read More
Author John Jos. Miller, 67, died January 5, 2022 at his home in Albuquerque NM. Miller was best known for his work in the long-running (since 1987) Wild Cards shared-universe series of original anthologies and novels, edited by George R.R. Martin.
John Joseph Miller (who wrote as John Miller, John J. Miller and John Jos. Miller) was born March 28, 1954 in central New York. He started reading the works ...Read More
After the Dragons, Cynthia Zhang (Stelliform Press 978-1-77709-174-3, $19.99 160pp, tp) August 2021. Cover by Wang Xulin.
“Shaolong. Throat scorch. Caused by long exposure to poor air quality, especially common in cities with high pollution indexes and poor environmental regulations – the same disease that killed his grandmother.”
Cynthia Zhang’s After the Dragons is a queer SFF novella that follows Xiang Kaifei (Kai), a jaded college student, and Elijah ...Read More
Many publishers have once again paused, postponed, or rescinded their plans to open offices for in-person employees, this time in response to the rise of the omicron variant of COVID-19.
Macmillan was scheduled to reopen its offices in New York City on January 10, but the opening has been postponed indefinitely. Employees will receive 30 days notice before they have to come back. Vaccinated staff may continue to come in ...Read More
Since a Certain Bug from outer space or wherever stopped last year’s national Swedish con, the year 2020 was added to the 2021 Swecon. The event took place in Dieselverkstan, Stockholm, November 19-21 with guests of honor Peadar Ó Guilín (Ireland), Adrian Tchaikovsky (UK), Eva Holmquist (local writer), and Maria Nilsson (local scholar). But we were lucky! Despite having Europe’s lowest virus curves – with cases dropping – our ever-so-wise ...Read More
The Best of Lucius Shepard Volume Two, edited by Bill Sheehan (Subterranean Press 978-1645240358, hardcover, 844pp, $50.00) December 2021.
When Subterranean Press gifted us all with The Best of Lucius Shepard in 2008, the author still walked among us, with some six productive years left in his wide-ranging, extravagant, hectic, and literarily prolific life. (He died in 2014 at the too-young-but-still-amazing-for-his-profligate-ways age of seventy.) One can presume Shepard had ...Read More
Build Your House Around My Body, Violet Kupersmith (Random House 978-0-81299-332-5, $27.00, 400pp, hc) July 2021.
Violet Kupersmith’s debut novel, Build Your House Around My Body, is a beautifully wrought, non-linear tale of ghosts, missing girls, and revenge set against the backdrop of colonial and post-colonial Vietnam. It’s not a spoiler to say that one of those disappearing girls is Ngoan Nguyen (though she prefers to go by ...Read More
Angry Robot has a new logo and an updated website:
We are happy to share our shiny “Maschinenmensch” inspired logo… designed and created by Kate Cromwell, a senior designer at Watkins Media. The logo goes hand in hand with our new website, which we’ve been soft launching for the past few weeks, and will be featuring on our books, starting with Ciel Pierlot’s Bluebird in February 2022. We feel that ...Read More
Weird Horror #2 The Deadlands 10/21 The Dark 9/21, 10/21 Apex #125
I’m still not convinced that its title matches its content, but Weird Horror’s second issue offers a couple of very good stories. Stephen Volk scores high with fantasy “Adventurous”: when Carole’s sexual encounter with Collin is interrupted by her mum’s unexpected return home, the young man hides in the wardrobe. It proves to be much more ...Read More
The Science Museum in South Kensington, London, has announced plans for a new “Science Fiction: Voyage into the Unknown” exhibit in autumn of 2022. The exhibit is planned as an interactive experience that “invites visitors to discover how scientists and science fiction creators have inspired each other to imagine and build new worlds to better understand our own” and explores “connections between significant scientific objects and authentic items from celebrated ...Read More
The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction: Volume 2, Tarun K. Saint, ed. (Hachette India 978-9391028626, ₹699.00, 488pp, hc; $10.99, eb) September 2021.
The first volume of Tarun K. Saint’s The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction (reviewed here in June 2019) seemed to serve two purposes: to present the variety of South Asian SFF to the world at large, and – equally important, to judge from Saint’s ...Read More
Fan, conrunner, and bookseller Willie Siros, 69, died January 5, 2022.
William Siros was born August 1952 in El Paso TX. He earned a BA in political science in 1974, and briefly attended graduate school for political theory. He began attending conventions in 1974, and chaired early Texas SF conventions Solarcon I and II (1975 and 1976). He produced a fanzine, Cambion, around the same time. Siros co-founded the Fandom ...Read More
Lightspeed 10/21 Mithila Review 3/21 Common Tongue 8/21 Bards & Sages 10/21
October’s Lightspeed has plenty of stories with chewy premises to enjoy. “Stowaways” by Andrew Dana Hudson is a flash piece told in the form of a museum sign explaining an art piece. This dangerous piece of art can “install” itself in viewers’ brains whenever enough “infected” people gather nearby. Its main effect is to generate companion ...Read More
The Heinlein Scholarships are open for applications. There are four $4,000 scholarships awarded to “undergraduate students of accredited 4-year colleges and universities.”
The Virginia Heinlein Memorial Scholarship is “dedicated to a female candidate majoring in engineering, math, or biological or physical sciences.” The other three awards, The Robert A. Heinlein, Dr. Yoji Kondo, and Dr. Jerry Pournelle scholarships, “may be awarded to a candidate of any gender.”
The deadline for ...Read More
Undiscovered Territories, Robert Freeman Wexler (PS Publishing 978-1-786365-89-7, ￡25.00, 326pp, tp) October 2021.
Although Undiscovered Territories is not Robert Freeman Wexler’s first collection – that would be 2008’s Psychological Methods to Sell Should Be Destroyed – it is his most complete, featuring most of the short fiction he’s published over the last two decades in magazines like Electric Velocipede, Polyphony, and The Journal of Experimental Fiction. The fourteen stories ...Read More
Dracula scholar Elizabeth Miller, 82, died January 2, 2022 in Toronto, Canada.
Her non-fiction volumes include A Dracula Handbook (2005), Reflections on Dracula: Ten Essays (1997), Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow (1998), Dracula: Sense & Nonsense (2000), Dracula, a Documentary Volume (2004), and Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula (2008, with Robert Eighteen-Bisang). She co-edited The Lost Journal of Bram Stoker (2012, with Dacre Stoker). Miller was the founding editor ...Read More
