Page 59 - Author Interview News Today

When I reviewed Karin Tidbeck’s story collection The Barnes & Noble Review, I said that it distilled and hybridized “almost every writer in the VanderMeers’ massive anthology  The Weird. A century’s worth of potent surrealism and estrangement surge through her veins and onto the page.” With the publication of her new novel, I’ll have to refine my description of her work, at least in this instance, because the book reveals that it is the sharp arrow tip of one particular lineage of...

x no longer on list (number of x’s: weeks off list) All lists rank hardcovers and paperbacks separately, except for the USA Today list, which is a single list combining fiction and nonfiction in all formats. Dates shown are posted dates, except those in parentheses, which are dates compiled. New York Times posts its list one week in advance of print publication. Note that some sources do not compile paperback bestsellers, and some exclude YA books (like the Harry Potter series) from their har...

Photo by Paula Mariel Salischiker If you learned your economics from Heinlein novels or the University of Chicago, you probably think that “free market” describes an economic system that is free from government interference – where all consensual transactions between two or more parties are permissible. But if you went to the source, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, you’ll have found a very dif­ferent definition of a free market: Smith’s concern wasn’t freedom from governments, ...

The QueerSciFi.com Flash Fiction Contest is open now through April 30, 2021, with the theme this year of “Ink”. Tell us about ink (and the stain it leaves) on your characters, the culture, and the world, for better or worse. We’ll be accepting works from across the queer spectrum, and would love to see more entries including lesbian, trans, bi, intersex and ace protagonists, as well as gay men. We also welcome diversity in ability (physical and mental) and in race. Stories must be no long...

Alvaro Zinos-Amaro (by Francesca Myman) Our very strange year invited, among other things, mournful reflections on a past that felt abruptly truncated, and a number of non-fiction titles, though surely in production before the world’s temporary suspension, were eerily attuned to this backward gaze. Then again, SF/F/H have a tendency to steep themselves deeply in their own genre pasts and traditions, even as they often compost these into unexpected futures, so the apparent synchronicity may be...

At this point, everyone knows about Murderbot. If you don’t know about Murderbot, what rock have you been hiding under? (Is it a comfy rock? I could use a nice rock-based holiday, away from all the news. And the pandemic.) Martha Wells’s Fugi­tive Telemetry is the sixth outing in the award-winning Murderbot Diaries. It forms a prequel to 2020’s Network Effect – a novel I read four times within a month of it arriving on my doorstep, and delighted in each time. Fugitive Telemetry is n...

The Jack L. Chalker Young Writers’ Contest is open to original science fiction and fantasy submissions by Maryland students “no younger than 14 and no older than 18 years of age.” First, second, and third prizes are $150, $100, and $50, respectively, and the deadline for submissions is March 31st, 2021. The contest is run by the Baltimore Science Fiction Society (BSFS) and “Judges shall be drawn from the membership of BSFS, Inc.” For more information, including complete submission gui...

Part way through The Silence by Don DeLillo (Picador) I came across a passage that resonated with me more that it perhaps might have done in other circumstances. One of the characters, in one of those archetypal DeLillo conversations that have the dispiriting and disconnecting feel of overlapping monologues, asks: “Is this the casual embrace that marks the fall of world civilization?” DeLillo’s novella was written before the pandemic that has had us all spending the year in that casual e...

Deuces Down is both the 16th and 30th book in the Wild Cards series. The anthology was first published in 2002; this new version is refreshed with added stories by Carrie Vaughn, Mary Anne Mohanraj, and Caroline Spector. Although re­ferred to on the title page as a mosaic novel, it remains – despite the linking story by Vaughn – an anthology of stories related only by the theme: deuces, folk with minor superpowers in the alter­nate superhero Wild Cards universe. If you are unaware of what...

—indeed, still is —one of my heroes. While I didn’t meet him until 2002, when I first went to Lawrence for the Sturgeon Award ceremony, I already admired his writing, both fiction and non-fiction, and had benefited greatly from his expansive, benevolent influence on science fiction as critic, anthologist, conference organizer and educator. Sitting rapt in Jim’s KU office as he talked about the field he loved, I realized that my own mentor John Kessel had sat there just the same, as Jim�...