Author: Cheryl Morgan

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 forgot to mention Sam Jordison’s latest foray into the back catalog of the Hugo Awards: this time he looks at Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama.

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.

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 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 click here.

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 work, see here.

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.

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, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 person has got ARCs of The Fallen Blade to several Guardian Book Blog contributors.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 from the other side of the world such as Helen Lowe and Trent Jamieson. Orbit’s operation is fairly international these days, so there’s a good chance you’ll be seeing all of these books in North America as well.