Browsed by
Category: News

2015 Philip K. Dick Award Winners Announced

2015 Philip K. Dick Award Winners Announced

Comments 0 Comment
The Book of the Unnamed Midwife-small Elysium Jennifer Marie Brissett-small

I’ve always liked the Philip K. Dick Award. Unlike the Hugos and the Nebulas, which frequently go to blockbuster hardcovers with big advertising budgets, the Philip K. Dick Award is presented annually for distinguished science fiction published as a paperback original in the United States. It’s named after Philip K. Dick, who published virtually every one of his most important and groundbreaking SF novels as a midlist paperback.

The 2015 Philip K. Dick Award winner is The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison (Sybaritic). Special citation was given to Elysium by Jennifer Marie Brissett (Aqueduct). The awards were announced on Friday, April 3, at Norwescon 38, in SeaTac, Washington.

…

Read More Read More

2014 James Tiptree, Jr. Award Winners Announced

2014 James Tiptree, Jr. Award Winners Announced

Comments 0 Comment
The Girl in the Road-small My Real Children-small

With all the drama and controversy over this year’s Hugo Awards, we have neglected to inform you of the other major award new this week. Shame on us.

The 2014 James Tiptree, Jr. Awards were given out this week. The Tiptrees, named after one of the finest SF writers of the 20th Century, are awarded annually to works of science fiction or fantasy that explore and expand gender roles. This year the winners are Monica Byrne’s The Girl in the Road (Crown) and Jo Walton’s My Real Children (Tor).

As usual, the jury released a statement about each of the winners; here’s what they said this year.

…

Read More Read More

Eastercon 66: Fun and Friction in Science Fiction

Eastercon 66: Fun and Friction in Science Fiction

Comments 0 Comment

banner_gap2_plus_text-1140x445

Last weekend I had the good fortune to attend Dysprosium, the 66th Eastercon, in London. It was only my second big convention and I was impressed by the number of people, dealers, panels, and events. Big cons are definitely my thing!

The convention was held at The Park Inn at Heathrow Airport, which is appropriately decorated with images of aviation and space pioneers. The elevators have glowing plastic panels that change colors and made me feel like I was in an Italian science fiction movie from the 1960s. The con was stretched out. Two large common rooms were connected by a long corridor. This meant that there was no main dealers room. Instead, each dealer had their own room and they took advantage of this by hosting their own events. Elsewhen Press gets my vote for friendliest dealer for offering plenty of friendly chatter, UFO-shaped candies, and several readings. Another dealer hosted a fascinating talk on Malaysian folklore. This worked out well for the guests but I heard more than one dealer complain they felt isolated from other dealers.

Like last year’s Worldcon, which I reported on here, diversity and inclusion was a central theme. Several of the panels reflected this, such as one on Fencing for Writers, in which two women demonstrated various ways to slash and skewer your opponent. They gave several anecdotes about female swashbucklers in the Renaissance. One French lesbian fought numerous duels with men over women and even saved her lover from a nunnery by burning the place down! That’s just begging to be made into a novel. The presenters made the telling point that, “Historians have dismissed these women as exceptions, but when you look at the sources, there are an awful lots of exceptions.”

…

Read More Read More

Sad Puppies and Super Puppies: The 2015 Hugo Train Wreck

Sad Puppies and Super Puppies: The 2015 Hugo Train Wreck

Comments 76 comments
Tony C. Smith and his 2010 Hugo for StarShipSofa
Tony C. Smith and his 2010 Hugo for StarShipSofa

As both Matthew David Surridge and I wrote about earlier this week, there’s been considerable controversy swirling around the just-announced ballot for the 2015 Hugo Awards, the most prestigious fan-based award in science fiction and fantasy. Matthew and I are involved in this controversy because we were both included, without our knowledge or consent, in a slate of bloc votes (the “Sad Puppies 3” and “Rabid Puppies”) that resulted in us being put on the ballot.

Matthew declined his nomination. Since Black Gate‘s nomination was for the entire site, a fan-based effort that involves over 40 participants, I decided not to decline on behalf of those individuals. But (no surprise) I had plenty to say about it, in my article “Black Gate Nominated for a Hugo Award in a Terrible Ballot.”

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this topic has riveted the entire industry. The two BG articles I link to above have been read over 32,000 times in less than three days… and Matthew and Black Gate were nominated for fan awards, the part of the ballot that, to be blunt, most people really don’t give a damn about.

There are just shy of 200 comments on those two posts, so the conversation is already getting a little unwieldy (and I find I have to keep repeating myself, because let’s face it, who can be bothered to read 200 comments before asking a simple question?) So I figured it made sense to do a quick re-cap, especially for those readers who surfed over here on their lunch hour, and have roughly the time it takes to eat a tuna fish sandwich to get caught up.

The crux of the matter is this.

…

Read More Read More

Black Gate Nominated for a Hugo Award in a Terrible Ballot

Black Gate Nominated for a Hugo Award in a Terrible Ballot

Comments 127 comments

The Goblin Emperor-smallThe nominees for the 2015 Hugo Awards have been announced by Sasquan, the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention, and let’s be blunt: it’s a terrible ballot.

Here’s a brief recap: over the last few years a number of writers (primarily conservative Americans) have become increasingly convinced that the growing number of women and non-white authors winning Hugo Awards is somehow evidence that the awards have been ‘hijacked’ by a minority group of voters and social justice warriors (SJWs). Their concerns are succinctly summarized at the right-wing new site Breitbart.com.

To make a point about how the awards are influenced by what they perceive as a small group of liberal elites, a handful of authors created a slate of nominees heavily dominated by conservative writers, and asked their followers to support those slates in their entirety. The primary slates were Brad Torgersen’s Sad Puppies 3 and Vox Day’s Rabid Puppies list.

Under cover of this semi-political movement, which added roughly 200 additional nominating ballots to last year’s total (and nearly 800 to the 2013 total), at least one of the organizers heavily seeded his slate with his own works. Vox Day’s Rapid Puppies ballot included no less than ten nominees for his Castalia House publishing company, and listed himself for both Best Editor (Short Form) and Best Editor (Long Form).

The results? As tabulated by Mike Glyer over at File 770, a total of 61 final ballot nominees from Sad Puppies 3 and Rabid Puppies made the final list of nominees. Only 24 nominees did not come from either list.

In short, the Hugo ballot this year was essentially dictated by two individuals who asked their followers to vote for their suggested candidates, regardless of what they actually thought was deserving.

…

Read More Read More

George R.R. Martin Offers a New Excerpt from The Winds of Winter

George R.R. Martin Offers a New Excerpt from The Winds of Winter

Comments 1 comment

Martin The Winds of Winter-smallBack in January we reported that The Winds of Winter, the sixth book in George R.R. Martin’s epic Song of Ice and Fire series, will not arrive this year, as some readers had hoped.

But to soothe the pain a little, Martin has been releasing small bits from the novel at his website. This morning he offered up a brand new chapter, featuring the return of a character who’s been absent for a long time. Here’s a small sample.

Alayne loved it here. She felt alive again, for the first since her father… since Lord Eddard Stark had died.

She closed the window, gathered up the fallen papers, and stacked them on the table. One was a list of the competitors. Four-and-sixty knights had been invited to vie for places amongst Lord Robert Arryn’s new Brotherhood of Winged Knights, and four­ and-sixty knights had come to tilt for the right to wear falcon’s wings upon their warhelms and guard their lord.

The competitors came from all over the Vale, from the mountain valleys and the coast, from Gulltown and the Bloody Gate, even the Three Sisters. Though a few were promised, only three were wed; the eight victors would be expected to spend the next three years at Lord Robert’s side, as his own personal guard (Alayne had suggested seven, like the Kingsguard, but Sweetrobin had insisted that he must have more knights than King Tommen), so older men with wives and children had not been invited.

And they came, Alayne thought proudly. They all came.

Read the complete chapter here, and the lengthy summary of everything we know about the novel so far over at Tor.com.

Gen Con Threatens to Leave Indiana Over Religious Freedom Bill

Gen Con Threatens to Leave Indiana Over Religious Freedom Bill

Comments 16 comments

Gen Con logo-smallGen Con has threatened to move out of Indiana if Republican Governor Mike Pence signs a controversial anti-gay law into effect.

Gen Con, the largest gaming convention in North America, began in Gary Gygax’s home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, in 1967; from 1985 to 2002 it was held in Milwaukee, and in 2003 it moved to its current home in Indianapolis, Indiana. Attendance last year was more than 56,000, making it the largest convention of any kind in the state.

The bill in question, Senate Bill 101 (SB101), has already passed the state legislature and is expected to be signed by Pence soon. It allows business owners to refuse to serve same-sex couples if they have religious objections, in the same manner that white business owners once were legally permitted to refuse to serve black customers in many southern states.

…

Read More Read More

See the Table of Contents for The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2015 Edition, edited by Paula Guran

See the Table of Contents for The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2015 Edition, edited by Paula Guran

Comments 0 Comment

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2015-smallPaula Guran’s Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror is one of the better Years’ Best anthologies on the market. It’s been published since 2010, and each and every volume somehow manages to introduce me to terrific new voices in dark fantasy.

This year looks no different. Paula Guran recently announced the table of contents for the 2015 volume on her website, including fiction from Laird Barron, Dale Bailey, Gemma Files, John Langan, Helen Marshall, Brandon Sanderson, Simon Strantzas, Jeff VanderMeer, and Ken Liu. Plus plenty of names I don’t recognize…. yet. I’m looking forward to another great collection.

Here’s the complete TOC (alphabetical by author).

Kelley Armstrong, “The Screams of Dragons” (Subterranean Press Magazine, Spring 2014)
Dale Bailey, “The End of the End of Everything” (Tor.com, 23 Apr 2014)
Laird Barron, “(Little Miss) Queen of Darkness” (Dark Discoveries #29)
Elizabeth Bear “Madam Damnable’s Sewing Circle” (Dead Man’s Hand)
Richard Bowes, “Sleep Walking Now and Then” (Tor.com, 9 July 2014)
Nadia Bulkin, “Only Unity Saves the Damned” (Letters to Lovecraft)

…

Read More Read More

Vintage Bits: TSI Kickstarter is Rebooting the SSI Gold Box Series

Vintage Bits: TSI Kickstarter is Rebooting the SSI Gold Box Series

Comments 2 comments

Pool of Radiance SSI Gold Box-smallIt’s tough for me to look back and pick just one favorite computer game. Sword of Aragon, Dragon Wars, Wizardry, Starflight, Starcraft, Diablo… there were so many classic games that offered marvelous interactive adventures in the early days of home computing.

But more and more as the years go by, I find myself calling out SSI’s Pool of Radiance, and the groundbreaking Gold Box series of Dungeons and Dragons games it spawned, as the best computer games I’ve ever played.

The Gold Box series was built on Wizard’s Crown, a top-down tactical RPG designed by Paul Murray and Keith Brors and released by SSI in 1985. Keith Brors became the lead designer for Pool of Radiance, which was published in 1988. Pool of Radiance was one of the top-selling computer games of all time, and over the next 10 years more than two million Gold Box titles were sold. All told there were nearly a dozen Gold Box games released, and SSI spun off other RPGs using the same engine, including the Buck Rogers and Spelljammer games.

SSI was eventually sold to Mindscape, and the era of the Gold Box games came to and end. But now a handful of SSI veterans, including Paul Murray and producer David Shelley, have formed a new company, Tactical Simulations Interactive (TSI), to produce brand new titles in the spirit of the Gold Box games. Their first release, Seven Dragon Saga, is being funded on Kickstarter.

Players of Seven Dragon Saga will control of six characters, the Touched, commanded by the Emperor to reclaim the wild Drakelands, which they must explore, tame and conquer, and eventually bring back into the Empire. Game development is already well advanced, and the demos included in the Kickstarter video look very promising indeed — and nicely reminiscent of both the Gold Box games, and later D&D classics like Baldur’s Gate.

The Kickstarter has a goal of $450,000, and in just two days has already raised over $66,000. It runs until April 13. See more details, or pledge your support, here.

Terry Pratchett, April 28, 1948 – March 12, 2015

Terry Pratchett, April 28, 1948 – March 12, 2015

Comments 3 comments

Terry Pratchett-smallSir Terry Pratchett, the besteselling author of more than 40 Discworld novels who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for services to British literature in 2009, died today at his home in Britain.

Pratchett published his first novel, The Carpet People, in 1971. The Colour of Magic, the first novel in the famous Discworld series, appeared in 1983. Discworld was an international phenomenon, making him the UK’s best-selling author in the 1990s. By the year 2000 he’d been knocked off that lofty pedestal by JK Rowling, but he remains the second most-read writer in the UK.

Pratchett sold over 85 million books in 37 languages. The 2011 Discworld release Snuff became the third-fastest-selling hardback adult novel on record in the UK, selling 55,000 copies in the first three days. He was very prolific, averaging about two novels a year.

Pratchett was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1998, and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for services to literature in 2009. In 2010 he received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement.

In December 2007, Pratchett announced he was suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Against all odds he continued writing, completing five additional novels in the Discworld series, including the forthcoming The Shepherd’s Crown, scheduled to be released in August. All told, Sir Terry published more than 70 books in a career than spanned more than four decades.

His death was announced on his Twitter account on Thursday morning. He died on March 12 at the age of 66.