Author: Cheryl Morgan

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.

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 by China Miéville.

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 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.

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 of the ideas we discussed here.

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.

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 just ordered a 5th reprint of the trade paperback edition, which is certainly a good indication of likely strong sales elsewhere.

Aside from that there is a strong streak of sequelitis amongst the high profile releases. Possibly the most significant announcement is that of the October release of The Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge. This is a sequel to the Hugo-winning A Fire Upon the Deep, which Tor are re-issuing in August.

Still in Hugo territory, Robert Charles Wilson’s Vortex, the third and final part of the series begun with Spin and Axis, is due out in July.

Other notable sequels include This Shared Dream (July) by Kathleen Ann Goonan, a follow-up to In War Times; and The Tempering of Men (August) by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear, a follow-up to A Companion to Wolves.

The final announcement that caught our eye is that in August Tor will be re-issuing John Brunner’s classic tale of an overpopulated world, Stand on Zanzibar. The book won the Hugo in 1969 and has lost little of its relevance since. Now if only Tor would also re-issue The Sheep Look Up…

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 about “talking squid in space”, though she has apparently now added “flying rabbits” to her definition. She does this in order to attempt to distance what she regards as the believable speculation of her novels, particularly Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, from less rigorous scientific extrapolation in what she believes science fiction to be.

In The Guardian‘s latest podcast Simon Ings responds to Damien Walter by arguing that science fiction is nothing but rigorous scientific extrapolation, devoid of all emotional content.

The apparent contradiction between these two explanations as to why science fiction is bad does not yet appear to have been noticed by anyone at The Guardian.

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.

Orbit UK has announced a couple of staff changes. Anne Clarke becomes editorial director (replacing Darren Nash who moved to Gollancz a few weeks ago). In addition James Long, author of the Speculative Horizons blog, has been taken on as an editorial assistant.

The big news, however, is that Jo Fletcher has left Gollancz after 16 years to start a brand new SF&F list at Quercus. In her time at Gollancz Fletcher has worked with authors such as Sir Terry Pratchett, Sir Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula Le Guin. The new Quercus imprint will be known as Jo Fletcher Books. We look forward to it.

Seanan McGuire, whom we interviewed for our current issue, has announced on her LiveJournal the sale of a new series of books to DAW. They are about a, “family of cryptozoologists”. Weird animals are out there, it appears, and McGuire knows where they are hiding.

Well yes, they are dead. But the very wonderful Science Fiction Oral History Association has a fine collection of recordings, and now they have a podcast too. The first episode of The Space Dog Podcast features a recording from 1976. It was made for Ballantine Science Fiction Hour, which may have been a radio show but may just have been put out on vinyl. Ballantine Books were obviously using it to promote their authors in much the same way as websites like Tor.com do with modern technology. The first half of the show is an interview with Sir Arthur C. Clarke. The second half is a discussion panel in which Isaac Asimov, Lester del Rey, Frederik Pohl, and Gordon R. Dickson discuss Clarke and much else besides. Highlights include Clarke expressing his admiration for Olaf Stapledon, Asimov explaining why he wants to be remembered for alien sex, and Pohl noting that he has a new book due out called Gateway that he thinks may be his best work to date.

Our columnist, Sam Jordison, has a new post up at the Guardian Book Blog. It is the latest in his series looking at past Hugo winners. This time he tackles To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip José Farmer.

Here’s a blog that may be of interest to many of you. It is called Bookmarketology, and it is run by Darren Turpin who is the Digital Marketing Manager for Little, Brown Book Group (UK). The purpose of the blog is to give practical advice on online promotion and marketing for published authors. Darren has been around the industry for a long time and knows his stuff.

Author and publisher Chris Roberson has announced on Twitter that he will be writing for DC’s Superman comic. With Paul Cornell already in charge of Action Comics, and about to get a stint on Batman and Robin, the science fiction community is starting to get serious traction in the comics world.

Roberson is no stranger to comics. He is already scripting Cinderella (a Fables spin-off) for Vertigo and Dust to Dust, a prequel to Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep, for Boom! Studios.

Update: Yes, we forgot iZombie (also from Vertigo), which is a really wonderful comic.

Today the BBC’s Woman’s Hour programme included a lengthy interview with Margaret Atwood about her novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, which was published 25 years ago. Presenter Jenni Murray and guest critic Alex Clark discuss the novel with Atwood, and examine its relevance in a world increasingly plagued by religious fundamentalism.

Of interest to our readers will be the fact that Clark very clearly describes the book as “science fiction”. Rather than dispute this, Atwood acknowledges that she was working in a tradition whose founding texts included Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984, which by inference are presumably also science fiction.

The programme is available here via the BBC iPlayer. The interview with Atwood takes up the first 20 minutes or so of the show.

Via Jeff VanderMeer we learn that Amazon.com has awarded a $15,000 grant to Shared Worlds, the SF&F writing camp for teenagers. Jeff has the full press release on his website.

Anime creator Yoshinobu Nishizaki died today. Jonathan Clements has an obituary at his personal blog.

Via Joe Gordon at FPI we learn about the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. Published by Routledge, with a planned two issues a year, the Journal intends:

to become a central platform for the academic debates around comics, comic strips, graphic novels and all forms of sequential art in terms of history and theory and to welcome and encourage new and groundbreaking approaches to the field.

The first issue is available free online here. The published papers include one by Paul Gravett titled “From Iky Mo to Lord Horror: representations of Jews in British comics.” Other papers cover the sexual identity of superheroes, comics as cultural resistance, the absence of black supervillains and nationalism.

The next issue will be on the subject of “Gender and Superheroes”. We are pleased to see that the call for papers lists Superheroes!: Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Films by Roz Kaveney as potential research material. We suspect that Jonathan Clements may have written relevant material as well.

It appears to be all go with editors these days. Not long ago we reported a change at the helm of Fantasy Magazine. Now two more publications have announced changes in editor.

Damien Broderick has stepped down as fiction editor of Cosmos, an Australian popular science magazine, and has been replaced by Cat Sparks.

And at Strange Horizons Susan Marie Groppi celebrated her World Fantasy Award win by retiring. Niall Harrison takes over as Editor-in-Chief, while Abigail Nussbaum moves into Niall’s seat as Senior Reviews Editor.

Takeshi Shudō, a scriptwriter on some of the best-known anime of modern times, including Pokémon: The First Movie, died last week. Jonathan Clements has a full obituary on his personal blog.

The Portal is an online review magazine specializing in short fiction from all around the world. The first issue has just gone live, and as well as a collection of interesting reviews it has articles about the science fiction and fantasy scenes in Bolivia, France and Denmark. You can read it here.

Hadley Rille, a US-based small press, is celebrating its fifth birthday by launching a new concept anthology, The Aether Age: Helios. The book imagines the industrialization of the ancient world (circa 600-100 BCE). It is edited by Christopher Fletcher and Brandon H. Bell and is now available for pre-order. Further information is available from the book’s website.

The already fairly crowded market for free online fiction magazines is to see a new entrant launching at midnight on October 31st. Concentrating on horror and dark fantasy, Dark Fiction will be entirely podcast. The magazine is based in the UK and edited by Sharon Ring and Del Lakin Smith. Further details are available from the magazine’s website.

Fantasy Magazine will be re-launching in March 2011 with a new editorial team. Sean Wallace, whose life has been blessed by the arrival of twin daughters, is retiring from day-to-day editing, though he remains as publisher. Cat Rambo is retiring to concentrate on her fiction. Front line editorial duties will be assumed by John Joseph Adams, who already edits Fantasy’s sister publication, Lightspeed. For further details, see JJA’s blog.

The blogosphere tends to uninteresting and repetitive discussions of the “difference between science fiction and fantasy”. Recently, however, we have seen a couple of people put a bit more thought into the issue. One such commentator is our own Karen Burnham, who has developed a rule of thumb for distinguishing between the two. The other is Hal Duncan who, as you might expect, has gone on rather longer on the topic, and mines the darker corners of the dictionary along the way. Both are worth checking out.

Paolo Bacigalupi has made it into the finals of the USA’s prestigious National Book Awards. This is not for his much-lauded The Windup Girl, but for this latest work, the YA novel, Ship Breaker, that we mentioned in issue #2. The full listings for all categories are available from GalleyCat.

The Guardian reports that legendary movie director, Ridley Scott, is to produce a TV mini-series based on Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle for the BBC. Scott is reported as saying that he is a lifelong fan of Dick’s work: “He is the master of creating worlds which not only spark the imagination but offer deeper commentary on the human condition.”

The series will be scripted by playwright Howard Brenton who is also a scriptwriter for Spooks. The series is projected to have four parts, but it is unclear how long it will run.