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Author: John ONeill

The Controversy over Nebula Awards Showcase 55, edited by Catherynne M. Valente

The Controversy over Nebula Awards Showcase 55, edited by Catherynne M. Valente

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Nebula Awards Showcase 55 (SFWA, August 2021). Cover by Lauren Raye Snow

I’m hearing some grousing about the latest Nebula Awards Showcase, edited by the distinguished Catherynne M. Valente.

This is the 55th volume in the long-running series, and the second to be published directly by SFWA, the Science Fiction Writers of America. As is customary, it contains the complete Nebula award-winning stories, as selected by that august body, as well as a tasty selection of the other nominees, as selected at the whim of the editor.

Well — not exactly. And that seems to be the crux of the problem. For the first time I can remember, the Nebula Awards Showcase contains only one of the winners from last year, A. T. Greenblatt’s short story “Give the Family My Love,” originally published in Clarkesworld. All the others — including the winners in novelette, novella, and novel category — are represented only by brief excerpts.

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Future Treasures: Sword & Planet edited by Christopher Ruocchio

Future Treasures: Sword & Planet edited by Christopher Ruocchio

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Sword & Planet (Baen Books, December 21, 2021). Cover by Kieran Yanner

Sword & Planet is experiencing a bit of a renaissance. Jason M Waltz and Fletcher Vredenburgh edited the fine The Lost Empire of Sol just this year, and even George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois dabbled recently with the genre in the acclaimed S&P anthologies Old Mars and Old Venus. Inspired by all this love for classic space fantasy, Howard Andrew Jones and I (under my ‘Todd McAulty’ moniker) chatted happily about Five Classic Sword-and-Planet Sagas over at Tor.com a while back.

Christopher Ruocchio, co-editor of Star Destroyers and Space Pioneers, presents his latest big anthology this month, and it looks like a treat. Sword & Planet has stories by Tim Akers, Susan R. Matthews, D.J. Butler, Jody Lynn Nye, Simon R. Green, Christopher Ruocchio, and many others. Weighing in at a generous 352 pages, it lands in less than two weeks — just in time for your last-minute holiday shopping.

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New Treasures: Activation Degradation by Marina J. Lostetter

New Treasures: Activation Degradation by Marina J. Lostetter

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Activation Degradation (Harper Voyager, September 2021)

Marina J. Lostetter is the author of the acclaimed Noumenon space opera series, and the fantasy novel The Helm of Midnight, released just this past April. She doesn’t appear interested in just soaking up the glory of those accomplishments, however — her next novel (and her second this year) arrived in September. Activation Degradation features a spunky robot hero in a fast-paced tale of alien invasion in high orbit over Jupiter, one with plenty of twists and turns along the way.

The Suspected Bibliophile calls it “Murderbot mixed with first contact with a heavy dash of body horror… from there it’s its very own being, filled with the horrors of space, the horrors of humanity, and the rising and falling implications of the reverberations of the past continuing to slam dunk on the present.” That definitely sounds like something I need.

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Watch the Windycon Sword & Sorcery Panel with Mike Penkas, David C. Smith, Adrian Simmons, and John O’Neill

Watch the Windycon Sword & Sorcery Panel with Mike Penkas, David C. Smith, Adrian Simmons, and John O’Neill

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Mike Penkas moderates the Sword & Sorcery panel at Windycon 47

Windycon 47 was held in Lombard, IL from November 12-14. I was a guest of the convention, with a reading and several panels, and it was an absolute delight to attend an in-person convention again. Carlos Hernandez was the Author Guest of Honor, and his wife Claire Suzanne Elizabeth Cooney (former Managing Editor of Black Gate) was the Poetry G.O.H. In addition to their other activities, the two conducted a public demo of their new card-based role playing game Negocios Infernales, and it was a ton of fun to participate. It was also great to meet up with so many other friends of BG, including Rich Horton, Steven H. Silver, Arin Komins, Rich Warren, Tina Jens, Brendan Detzner, Richard Chwedyk, and many others.

But the highlight of the convention for me was Sunday’s Sword & Sorcery panel, a lively discussion of S&S past and present. Michael Penkas moderated, and the speakers were Adrian Simmons (distinguished editor of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly magazine), author David C. Smith (Red Sonja, Oron, Coven House, and Robert E. Howard: A Literary Biography), and yours truly.

The discussion ranged far and wide — the golden age of the S&S in the pulps, Sword & Soul, Howard Andrew Jones’ groundbreaking Hanuvar stories, the work of James Enge, the Red Sonja comics of the 70s, the artist Frank Thorne, S&S in video games and RPGs, the new S&S boom in magazines like Tales From the Magician’s Skull and Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Andre Norton and The Beastmaster, and much more. The SMOF masters of Windycon recorded the entire thing, and you can listen to it in its entirety here (the panel kicks off right around the 2:04:00 mark).

Vintage Treasures: High Tension by Dean Ing

Vintage Treasures: High Tension by Dean Ing

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High Tension (Ace Books, 1982). Cover by Walter Velez

Dean Ing was a staple in James Baen’s paperback magazines of the late seventies, Destinies (eleven volumes from Ace Books, 1978-1981) and the copycat series Baen kicked off after he left Ace to found Baen Books, Far Frontiers (seven issues, 1985-86). I also saw Ing’s name semi-regularly in Analog and OMNI around the same time. He produced four collections: Anasazi (1980), a set of three connected tales of first contact with a group of surprisingly violent aliens stranded in west Texas in near future 1996; High Tension (1982); Firefight 2000 (1987), later re-released in 2000 as Firefight Y2K, in an attempt to stay cool; and the linked story cycle The Rackham Files (2004).

Ing was an academic with a military background, and that was definitely reflected in his fiction. He served as an interceptor crew chief in the United States Air Force, and he became an aerospace engineer, and eventually a university professor with a doctorate in communications theory. His fiction captured a lot of the public anxieties towards rapidly-advancing technology, especially weapons tech, including his 1989 New York Times bestseller, The Ransom of Black Stealth One.

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New Treasures: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 edited by Veronica Roth and John Joseph Adams

New Treasures: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 edited by Veronica Roth and John Joseph Adams

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The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 (Mariner Books, October 2021). Cover uncredited

John Joseph Adams was my editor on my first novel, The Robots of Gotham, so naturally I assume he is the leading editor in the field (you should too.) For the past seven years he has been editing The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy with a strong line-up of annual co-editors, including Karen Joy Fowler, N.K. Jemisin, and Carmen Maria Machado. This year Veronica Roth joins him at the podium, the bestselling author of The Divergent series and Chosen Ones.

The 10 fantasy tales in this year’s volume are by Kate Elliott, Ken Liu, Yohanca Delgado (with two stories), and others; the ten SF stories are from Daryl Gregory, Ted Kosmatka, Karen Lord, Tochi Onyebuchi, Yoon Ha Lee, and others. Also within are Celeste Rita Baker’s World Fantasy Award Winner “Glass Bottle Dancer,” Meg Elison’s Locus Award winner “The Pill,” and Sarah Pinsker’s Nebula winner “Two Truths and a Lie.” Here’s a look at some recent reviews.

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Wise in the Ways of Procrastination: James Davis Nicoll on the Science Fiction Book Club, and Five Great Books He Never Meant to Read

Wise in the Ways of Procrastination: James Davis Nicoll on the Science Fiction Book Club, and Five Great Books He Never Meant to Read

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Ursula K. Le Guin’s Three Hainish Novels (SFBC, 1978), John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up (Del Rey, 1981),
and Triplicity (SFBC, 1980) by Thomas M. Disch. Covers: Jack Woolhiser, Murray Tinkelman, and Ron Logan

Over at Tor.com, occasional Black Gate contributor James Davis Nicoll has penned a charming look back at the way the Science Fiction Book Club introduced him to some terrific science fiction.

While but a callow youth, I subscribed to the Science Fiction Book Club. The club, wise in the ways of procrastination, would send each month’s selection of books to subscribers UNLESS the subscribers had sent the club a card informing the SFBC that one did not want the books in question. All too often I planned to send the card off, only to realize (once again), when a box of books arrived, that intent is not at all the same thing as action.

Thus, I received books that I would not have chosen but, once in possession, I read and enjoyed them. All praise to the SFBC and the power of procrastination! Here are five of my favorite unintended reading experiences…

Anyone who was a member of the SFBC knows of what James speaks — this is exactly how I discovered Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber. Check out the complete article here.

Vintage Treasures: Other Days, Other Eyes by Bob Shaw

Vintage Treasures: Other Days, Other Eyes by Bob Shaw

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Other Days, Other Eyes (Ace, 1972). Cover by J. H. Breslow

Bob Shaw was a prolific science fiction writer from Northern Ireland who wrote over two dozen novels, including The Orbitsville trilogy, about the discovery of an intact Dyson sphere orbiting a far star, Medusa’s Children (1977), Who Goes Here? (1977), and perhaps his most popular book, the Hugo-nominated The Ragged Astronauts (1986), the tale of a technologically advanced civilization that builds spaceships out of wood. It wasn’t something you forgot in a hurry.

Shaw produced several highly-regarded collections, including Ship of Strangers (a fix-up novel, 1978) and Cosmic Kaleidoscope (1979). His most famous short story is still fondly remembered today: the Hugo and Nebula nominee “Light of Other Days,” originally published in John W. Campbell’s Analog Science Fiction and Fact in August 1966. The central concept of ‘slow glass’ — which slows down light so that it takes years or decades to pass through — was simple and enormously compelling, and Shaw returned to the idea several times, most notably in his 1972 fix-up novel of slow glass stories, Other Days, Other Eyes.

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Intelligent Lizards, Asteroid Mining, and Hardboiled Noir: November/December 2021 Print SF Magazines

Intelligent Lizards, Asteroid Mining, and Hardboiled Noir: November/December 2021 Print SF Magazines

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November/December 2021 issues of Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, and The Magazine
of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Cover art by Maurizio Manzieri, Shutterstock, and Maurizio Manzieri (again)

The November/December print magazines have an impressive list of contributors, including Jack McDevitt, Nalo Hopkinson, Robert Reed, Eleanor Arnason, David Gerrold, Megan Lindholm, Bill Pronzini & Barry N. Malzberg, Jack Skillingstead, Sandra McDonald, Sheila Finch, R. Garcia y Robertson, Ray Nayler, Gregory Feeley, Shane Tourtellotte, Alice Towey, and many others.

Sam Tomaino at SFRevu has been covering science fiction magazines for over a decade. Here’s a few of his thoughts on the latest Analog.

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Meanwhile, in a Universe with Space Ninjas and Sentient Insectoids: Neodymium Exodus by Jen Finelli MD

Meanwhile, in a Universe with Space Ninjas and Sentient Insectoids: Neodymium Exodus by Jen Finelli MD

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Neodymium Exodus (WordFire Press, October 2021)). Cover design by Janet McDonald

Kevin J. Anderson’s Wordfire Press has published plenty of SF the last few years, including exciting books by Cat Rambo, Paul Di Filippo, D.J. Butler, Bill Ransom, R.M. Meluch, Mike Resnick, Lou Antonelli, Robert Asprin, Alan Dean Foster, Frank Herbert, Brenda Cooper — and even the first Nexus novel by Mike Baron.

Of course, any publisher worth its salt really proves itself by discovering and promoting new authors. So I was intrigued to see Neodymium Exodus cross my desk, the first novel in a “fun, frenetic space opera” (Publishers Weekly) featuring “sentient insectoids, purple jungles, and insane electromagnetic fields.” I don’t much about the author, Jen Finelli MD, except that she likes to put ‘MD’ after her name, which tells me that at some point in our relationship she’s likely to remind me I’m overdue for a colonoscopy.

Anyway, you lot know how I feel about space opera. I think I’ll settle down with this one in my big green chair.

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