The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (or is it a Company?), who previously talked to Ellen Datlow, now also interview SF editor Jim Frenkel. Perhaps they're trying to collect the set.
A non-free podcast interview with John Meaney is up at the Dragon Page.
Michael Berry reviews SF for kids in the San Francisco Chronicle.
SF Crowsnest reports on Little, Brown's plans to move Tim Holman, the Publishing Director of Orbit (their SF/Fantasy imprint in the UK), to the US and have him oversee a unified SF publishing program for the US, UK and Australia. (I found a direct-linkable version of the story at The Alien Online.)
SF Crowsnest also interviews Hal Duncan, author of the sublimely ambitious Vellum.
Sci Fi Weekly, not to be left out, interviews Frederik Pohl, whom I suspect is the only man alive who can get away with calling Robert Silverberg "Bobby."
The finalists for the 2006 Prix Aurora Awards (the "Canadian Hugos," as they've sometimes been called) have just been announced. And the nominees in the English-language categories are:
Best Long-Form Work in English
Best Short-Form Work in English
Emerald City reprints a press release about a SF/Fantasy Conference, sponsored by Science Fiction World magazine, which will be held in Chengdu, China just before next year's Worldcon in Yokohama, Japan.
On the one hand, it is right next door, geographically speaking, and there's the "might as well" factor. But, on the other hand, I have to imagine there's very few of us who can swing that much time away at once, or that much money for two pricey conferences in a row.
Any hardy souls out there prepared to hit both of these?
Emerald City has reported that Bridget (Bug) Bradshaw is the winner of this year's Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund; she will be attending L.A. Con IV and also touring the fannish parts of the US as part of her official duties.
The TAFF is the oldest of the fan funds, and started in 1953 as a way to help popular but impecunious fans from North America travel to major European conventions and vice versa. It's voted on each year by interested fans, and funded by the same.
This may be the most minor award I ever announce, but it's always nice to encourage the kids.
Fourth, fifth and sixth graders in Ontario, Canada, annually vote for their favorite book, in both fiction and non-fiction categories. It's called the Silver Birch Award.
This year, the award for Fiction went to Wolf Pack by Edo van Belkom.
Congratulations to Mr. van Belkon, and good for the kids for picking a fantasy book and not one of those dreary novels where the mother dies.
Martin Morse Wooster reviews books by Ian McDonald, Bruce Sterling, and David Wellington in the Washington Post.
The Times (of London) reports that an invisibility cloak may not be as impossible as we'd all thought.
On the other hand, Nature thinks a space elevator is less likely than we'd previously thought.
Non-fiction and fantasy writer Justine Larbalestier is profiled by the Brisbane Courier Mail.
Publishers Weekly interviews Natasha Randall, who has just translated Yevgeny Zamyatin's We for a new US edition.
The Book Standard is very unimpressed by the movie version of Philip K. Dick's novel A Scanner Darkly.
This is not a joke: John Scalzo thinks John Scalzi's Hugo-nominated novel Old Man's War would make a great videogame.
SFFWorld interviews Kit Reed.
These were announced a few days ago, but I only just found out about them (via Cheryl Morgan's Emerald City) this morning. These awards are given by the Lambda Literary Foundation to support the creation and dissemination of writings by, for and about the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered community.
There's a full list of the awards reported here, but the one of interest to our genre is:
Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror Daughters of an Emerald Dusk by Katherine Forrest (Alyson Books)
Barry R. Levin, the noted fine and antiquarian bookseller, has announced the winners of the 18th Annual Collectors Award:
JACK VANCE
the Collectors Award for 2005 for
MOST COLLECTABLE AUTHOR OF THE YEAR
HILL HOUSE, PUBLISHERS
the Collectors Award for 2005 for
MOST COLLECTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR:
the Lettered State of AMERICAN GODS by Neil Gaiman
DANIEL J. H. LEVACK
the special
LIFETIME COLLECTORS AWARD
for his outstanding bibliographic contributions to the study of the works of L. Sprague De Camp, Philip K. Dick, Frank Herbert, Jack Vance, and Roger Zelazny
Considering that Levin is a bookseller, and he aparrently decides who wins each year all by himself, this looks a lot like "the things I sold a lot of last year." But awards are always nice, and congratulations to Jack Vance. (And thanks to Robert J. Sawyer, whom I heard the news from.)
You probably already know that Neil Gaiman's excellent YA novella-as-a-book Coraline won the Hugo Award. You might even know that it's being made into a stop-motion animated movie by director Henry (The Nightmare Before Christmas) Selick.
If you're really plugged in, you'll have heard that Dakota Fanning will play Coraline. But have you heard that Teri Hatcher has joined up to play the dual role of Mother and...Other Mother? (Read the book -- you'll get it then.)
Also: Neil Gaiman posted a quite neat piece of early concept art for the movie on his blog yesterday.
I don't mind saying that this is one movie I'm really looking forward to.
Sci Fi Wire reports that Anne McCaffrey's "Dragonriders of Pern" series will be turned into a movie by Copperheart Entertainment, a company which has not made a feature film to date. (And, when I say "a movie," I really mean "the first of what I think everyone assumes will be a long series of obscenely profitable movies.")
McCaffrey's Pern almost turned into a live-action TV show in 2001, but production shut down amid differing reports of the problems, and nothing ever emerged. I hope Copperheart has better luck this time.
It's being reported today (for example, here from the BBC) that the tremendously expensive, and critically ravaged, musical Lestat, by Elton John based on Anne Rice's vampire novels, will close on Sunday after only 39 performances.
That, my friends, is what we call a mega-flop. And, being the third recent vampire Broadway mega-flop, I think it (snicker) nails the lid on the coffin for this particular genre of musical theater.
If Jim Baen gets his way, you'll be able to read his new online magazine, Jim Baen's Universe, just about anywhere: on a computer, on a cellphone, on a PDA, and (dare we dream?) perhaps on your next-generation direct mental interface.
Here's a press release about the mobile functionality, and here's the main page for the magazine. If you think most modern short SF is too focused on fancy language and downbeat endings, then you'll want to check it out.
The Green Man Review reviews the fancy, expensive, limited-edition standalone volume edition of Charles Stross's novella Missile Gap today. Their reviewer liked the story about as much as I did, which is "a lot."
However, she did fail to mention that "Missile Gap" is also available in much cheaper form, along with five other swell new novellas, in Gardner Dozois's One Million A.D. , a SFBC Creation and Exclusive.
There's an interview with Terry Brooks, mostly about his upcoming novel Armageddon's Children, in The Book Standard this week.
(Armageddon's Children will be a SFBC Selection in the September magazine.)
One of my current guilty-favorite series, Jim Butcher's "Dresden Files," is going to be a TV series on the Sci-Fi Channel, reports Sci Fi Wire.
If you want to catch up on your reading before the pilot airs in January, the SFBC has the first three books in our Wizard for Hire omnibus, the next two in a book called Wizard by Trade, and the two after that coming up later this year in a book we'll be calling Wizard at Large. (And then there's one more book after that, if you're a particularly fast reader.)
The "People's Choice Awards" of the book industry (with all the class and literary cachet that implies), The Quill Awards, are back for a second year. I note that these awards are sponsored by the major book-trade publication (Publishers Weekly) and by a TV network (NBC). I further note that books have to get a starred review in Publishers Weekly -- or hit the top of the PW bestseller list -- to qualify for the award.
The fact that the inaugural 2005 award for Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror went to Christopher Moore's The Stupidest Angel (a fine book, I'm sure, but about as far from a genre SF/Fantasy book as you can get) just puts the icing on the cake.
Still, if you happen to be a bookseller or a librarian, you may be able to nominate and vote, so you could check out the link and see what interesting treats are in store for this year.
Locus Online had the news first:
The Nominees for the 2005 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science-fiction novel of the year are:
(I've added links for those books available through the SFBC.)
And the Nominees for the 2005 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best science-fiction story are:
(The Link, McDonald and Willis stories are included in Jonathan Strahan's Best Short Novels: 2006. The Gregory story is included in David Hartwell's and Kathryn Cramer's Year's Best SF 11. And the Bacigalupi, Gregory, McDonald, McIntyre, and Sterling stories are included in Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction, 23rd Annual Collection.)
The winners of both awards will be announced during the Campbell Conference and Award Banquet, to be held the weekend of July 6-9 at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.
Since John at SF Signal thought it would be a good idea, I'll list some of the upcoming omnibuses and other special editions from the SFBC. At the moment, the Summer magazine is at the printers (I've got a list of the new books in that one ready to post the day that magazine goes into the mail) and we're buying books for our September and Fall magazines. So the projects I can mention now are mostly coming out in between:
In July, there's a 3-in-1 of Alan Dean Foster's The Taken Trilogy.
In August, a 2-in-1 catching us up on Kim Harrison's "Rachel Morgan" series, under the title Dead Witches Tell No Tales. (Some of the titles we didn't use ended up on my personal blog in this entry.)
The next issue is called Worldcon, since we ran out of months in the year. One of our Selections is Escape from Earth: New Adventures, a brand-new and completely original anthology edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, featuring new novellas from Kage Baker, Orson Scott Card, Joe Haldeman, Geoffrey Landis, Elizabeth Moon, Allen Steele and Walter Jon Williams. The theme of this one is young people in space -- it's not exactly a "young adult" anthology, but it's suitable for younger readers as well as old crotchety ones.
We're still working on the September issue, but there will be an Ellen Kusher 2-in-1 called Swords of Riverside, which collects her classic swashbuckler Swordspoint and its new sequel The Privilege of the Sword.
After that comes Fall, which is mostly question marks at this point. But I did just buy a third omnibus of Jim Butcher's tremendously entertaining "Dresden Files" series, which will be called Wizard at Large.
Further into the future, things get much murkier, because we haven't bought much of anything yet. But I can say that we have three more original anthologies signed up, all of which should be published some time in 2007: Alien Crimes, edited by Mike Resnick, with new novellas promised from writers like Gregory Benford and Harry Turtledove; Wizards, edited by Marvin Kaye, with new novellas expected from writers such as Peter Beagle and Jim Butcher; and Galactic Empires, edited by Gardner Dozois, which is so new that I don't think we have anyone signed up for it yet. (All titles are quite likely to change by the time the books finally emerge, though.) There are other things in the works as well, which I'll announce here as they become real.
And I also hope the SFBC 50th Anniversary Collection will continue with another batch of eight books to cover the best SF/Fantasy of the 1990s, though I haven't started to make a solid list for that yet. (So now would be a good time to make suggestions, either as a comment or in e-mail.)
That should do for now; I also intend to regularly post a list of books we've recently bought about once a week, probably on Fridays.
You've still got two months -- the dealine for voting is midnight on July 31st -- but you can now vote for the 2006 Hugos (assuming you are a member of the Worldcon, L.A. Con IV) right now online.
Vote early if you like, vote late if you like -- but, please, don't vote often.
There have been a couple of outside reviews of SFBC original books lately, for those looking for a more unbiased opinion. (We, of course, love our books, but they're our babies!)
SF Signal on Down These Dark Spaceways.
Bookgasm on Best Short Novels: 2005.
All of those books are available only from the SFBC. (Though, if you happen to be a publisher, we'd love for you to make us an offer to do them in the trade.)
The Nebula Awards Banquet was held the evening of May 6th in sunny (and quite hot) Tempe, Arizona. Harlan Ellison was named the newest Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, William F. Nolan was honored as the night's Author Emeritus, and the usual awards were given out:
This was the first year for the Andre Norton Award, which honors the late Grand Master by promoting the best in speculative fiction for young adults.