Ray Bradbury has died, chronologically at age 91, though he managed throughout his career to maintain the awe and wonder of a 12-year old.
Here is a picture of him surrounded by one of the many anachronisms he loved, something called printed books.
And here’s something I wrote a while ago about his influence on me.
Holy cats! That was fast. The editors of Weird Tales magazine have announced it is closing to submissions on Tuesday, June 5th.
Now, Black Gate magazine is in no position to throw stones about being closed to submissions. We’ve been closed since roughly the Napoleonic era. But still… didn’t Weird Tales just announce it was open?
Let me check. Yup, it did.
[If you’re too lazy to click on that link, you can just scroll down the page to the announcement four days ago.]
All right, we’re done being snarky. And we will note that the magazine is only closing to fiction submissions — artists and disheveled arcane researchers, your contributions are still valued. [Okay. We’ve still got a little snark left.] Here’s the official announcement:
Heads up that at noon eastern time on Tuesday June 5th we will be closing for fiction submissions. We will still be looking at art and nonfiction proposals.
There’s still time to finish your submission and get it in the mail by Monday morning. Stock up on coffee, turn off the phone, and channel Clark Aston Smith. Fame and Fortune await you.
But act fast.
Last weekend I drove to Madison, Wisconsin, for Wiscon, one of the best SF conventions in the Midwest. My travel companions were four young women, and the two-hour drive from Chicago was filled with enthusiastic discussions of My Little Pony, how to cook kale, the most satisfactory sexual positions, and who that hot-looking agent was. When I wasn’t driving I sat in the back and kept my mouth shut.
You can learn a lot about life by keeping your mouth shut. For example, I learned I definitely need to check out My Little Pony.
I learned some important stuff at Wiscon, too. Wiscon has some pretty heavy panels, with titles like Intersectionality and Feminist Community, Dogmatic Rationalism, and Performing Katniss in Print and On Screen: Gender Performativity and Deconstructing Reality TV in The Hunger Games.
No, I didn’t learn what any of those things meant. The first thing I learned at Wiscon was: Don’t volunteer to be on panels. It’s like picking my teeth with a golf club — it’s painful, and it makes me look stupid.
But the second thing I learned was: Wiscon has the best reading program on the continent. And if you’re not listening to talented authors reading their work, you’re wasting your precious hours here on Planet Earth.
So I packed my hours with as many readings as I could. At the last two Wiscons I simply followed the brilliant C.S.E. Cooney — the Queen of Wiscon, and her most gifted reader-poet — as readings seemed to spontaneously spring forth wherever she wandered. But this year she was in Ottawa giving a command performance at the most prestigious venue in the country, Canada’s National Art Centre, so we were forced to rely on our own devices. When there weren’t any readings, my driving companions and I simply created our own. In the process we were introduced to some of the hottest new writers on the fantasy scene, and several really terrific new, upcoming, or wholly undiscovered SF and fantasy novels.
Below is a list of the best of the best.
Attention all aspiring fantasy writers! (Yeah, I know that’s most of you.) Weird Tales has re-opened to submissions.
Now, I know you never read Submission Guidelines. But before you run off to send editor Marvin Kaye your latest short fiction masterpiece, I urge you to check out the guidelines. There’s lots of news — for example, the pay rate has dropped from 5 cents/word to 3 cents/word — but perhaps most interesting is the announcement that the magazine has shifted to themed issues. Upcoming themes include Elder Gods & Cthulhu (#360), Fairy Tales (#361) and Undead (#362), and if you’ve got a story in the latter two categories, the editors are especially interested:
Please know that each issue of Weird Tales – beginning with issue 360 – will be featuring a theme. This means that HALF of each issue will be devoted to strange and innovative takes on that theme. This also means that HALF of each issue will be devoted to the unclassifiable and eclectic tales that have always been the soul of Weird Tales.
Our current needs are… Stories for our Undead issue (#362). This issue is quite far along, but we seek unusual and radical takes on Zombies, Ghouls, chiang-shih’s, the Lich and other creatures yet undefined. Even vampires, if you have found a new wrinkle. Theme-related poetry is welcome.
We also have a bit of space left in the Fairy Tales issue (#361), so if you have worked on something for us, send away.
Be sure you are submitting an unpublished story or poem.
Because we publish half of the magazine as unthemed content, you may submit any variety of fantasy including science fiction (though we will not use much of the latter). We are currently most interested in stories between 3,000-5,000 words, but longer stories are acceptable. However, it may take quite a while for a long or unthemed story to be published. Short shorts, i. e., flash fiction, are definitely of interest to us.
The complete guidelines are here.
One of the year’s most anticipated books has arrived — a few days ahead of its official June 1 publication date.
The Sword & Sorcery Anthology, edited by David G. Hartwell and Jacob Weisman, is now on sale. This massive 480-page tome contains classic S&S tales from the writers who created the genre — including C. L. Moore, Fritz Leiber, Robert E. Howard, Poul Anderson, Karl Edward Wagner and Michael Moorcock — as well as modern masters such as Charles R. Saunders, Glen Cook, George R. R. Martin, Jeffrey Ford, and Caitlín R. Kiernan.
It also includes “Epistle from Lebanoi,” an original tale by Michael Shea, author of the classic Nifft the Lean, and “The Year of the Three Monarchs,” a new story by Michael Swanwick.
The early reviews have already been filled with praise, including this one from Publishers Weekly:
Hartwell and Weisman have selected some of the best short-form work in the genre… This is an unbeatable selection from classic to modern, and each story brings its A game.
With an introduction by David Drake, “Storytellers: A Guided Ramble into Sword and Sorcery Fiction” and a tantalizing assortment of stories I’m unfamiliar with — including “Gimmile’s Song” by Charles R. Saunders, “Soldier of an Empire Unacquainted with Defeat” by Glen Cook, “Six from Atlantis” by Gene Wolfe, and “Path of the Dragon” by George R. R. Martin — this ones leaps right to the top of my want list.
The Sword & Sorcery Anthology is published by Tachyon Publications, and priced at $15.95 for the print version and $10.95 in digital format. More complete details are here, and the complete Tables of Contents is here.
Catherynne M. Valente has announced her third Prester John novel, following The Habitation of the Blessed and The Folded World, will not be published by Night Shade Books. In a statement on her blog last week she said:
I continue to think that Night Shade puts out wonderful books and I hope for their success. I did not take this step lightly. But their recent troubles have made our business relationship difficult, and I could not in good conscience proceed with a third book given the circumstances. Obviously I’m being a bit vague – there’s no point in airing laundry in public… What this means is that at the moment, The Habitation of the Blessed and The Folded World are for the most part unavailable. Some copies will float around for awhile yet, but most of the e-versions are gone. I hope to fix this in the next week – I have relicensed the covers from the excellent Rebecca Guay and Night Shade has been very kind and accommodating with regards to physical copies and digital files…
As for the third and final book in the series, The Spindle of Necessity, I am committed to finding a way to make sure you get to see it. I owe you a finish. Oddly enough, Prester John is my longest series to date, and I want to bring it all to a close the way I planned to from the beginning… Given the market realities, the most likely avenue for this is a Kickstarter campaign to fund a self-published version.
At press time, both The Habitation of the Blessed and The Folded World are available at Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com, in both print and Kindle versions. But if you’re interested in getting copies, you want want to move quickly.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, US publishers of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Animal Farm, 1984, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, and numerous books by Harlan Ellison, Kage Baker, Philip K. Dick, Philip Roth, Ray Bradbury, James Morrow, Margaret Atwood, Diane Duane, Jane Yolen and literally hundreds of others, filed for bankruptcy protection today.
Houghton Mifflin, an educational and trade publisher in the United States, acquired Harcourt Publishing in 2007 to become Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The company has 4,000 employees around the world.
It officially filed for pre-packaged bankruptcy this morning, citing debts and liabilities of over $1 billion. The filing is part of a restructuring that it hopes will cut debt by $3.1 billion. The company issued a statement today, saying it:
will maintain normal day-to-day business operations throughout the restructuring process, and we expect no disruptions to our relationships with our customers, agents, authors, employees, business partners and suppliers. Additionally, our plan provides for our suppliers and vendors to be paid in full during and after this process and for our employees to continue receiving their usual pay and benefits.
The company said it still expects to complete the restructuring by the end of June. For additional details, see this article at Publisher’s Weekly.
I admit I never know when to blog about Subterranean magazine. I really enjoy it, and I used to go to great lengths to acquire the print issues. But now that they’ve converted to an online zine they’re releasing the contents in a rolling format, a new story or article every week.
Do I announce it here when the first article goes up? Or wait until the entire magazine is posted, two months later? By the time a new issue is up, I’ve already forgotten what I did last time. So over the years I’ve finally developed a consistent system: I blog about it whenever I remember.
So here I am to tell you about the Spring 2012 issue. And it’s got a terrific line-up, nearly 70,000 words of fiction, including two big novellas from Jay Lake and Allen Steele:
Subterranean is edited by William Schafer, and published quarterly. The Spring 2012 issue is completely free and available here.
We last covered Subterranean magazine with their previous issue, Winter 2012.
I’ve received word this morning that contributor copies of Aqueduct Press’s The Moment of Change have started to arrive, and the book is now available for order on their website.
The Moment of Change is an anthology of feminist speculative poetry with an absolutely stellar line-up of contributors, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Jo Walton, Delia Sherman, Catherynne M. Valente, Theodora Goss, Phyllis Gotlieb, Yoon Ha Lee, Nisi Shawl, Greer Gilman, Sonya Taaffe, JoSelle Vanderhooft, and Nicole Kornher-Stace.
It also includes two members of Team Black Gate: two poems by Amal El-Mohtar, “Pieces” and “On the Division of Labour,” and a long poem by our website editor, C.S.E. Cooney, “The Last Crone on the Moon.” The anthology is edited by Rose Lemberg, and she’s posted the complete Table of Contents here. In her introduction she writes:
In these pages you will find works in a variety of genres — works that can be labeled mythic, fantastic, science fictional, historical, surreal, magic realist, and unclassifiable; poems by people of color and white folks; by poets based in the US, Canada, Britain, India, Spain, and the Philippines; by first- and second-generation immigrants; by the able-bodied and the disabled; by straight and queer poets who may identify as women, men, trans, and genderqueer.
I had the pleasure of listening to C.S.E. read “The Last Crone on the Moon” last year at the monthly Top Shelf Books Open Mic here in Chicago, and it is worth the price of the book alone.
Rose Lemberg and many of the contributors will be reading from The Moment of Change at Wiscon in Madison, Wisconsin this weekend. I’ll be there, and I’m looking forward to it.
The Moment of Change is 174 pages in paperback. The cover art is by Terri Windling. It sells for $20.
I turned 48 today. Not a bad accomplishment, considering that when I started reading science fiction in 1974, I didn’t even know people got that old. And ever since I started reading novels on my iPad and Kindle, I’ve decided I’m officially living in the future. SF used to prep me for the future, but whatever the next 48 years have in store, I ain’t ready.
Fortunately some things don’t change. People fall in love, tax bills come due, and great writing still wins awards. Case in point: the 2011 Nebula Awards, given out last night in a ceremony at the Nebula Awards Weekend in Arlington, Virginia.
Novel
Among Others, Jo Walton (Tor)
Novella
“The Man Who Bridged the Mist”, Kij Johnson (Asimov’s, Oct-Nov, 2011)
Novelette
‘‘What We Found’’, Geoff Ryman (F&SF Sept-Oct, 2011)
Short Story
“The Paper Menagerie”, Ken Liu (F&SF, March-April 2011)
Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation
Doctor Who: “The Doctor’s Wife”
Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book
The Freedom Maze, Delia Sherman (Big Mouth House)
You can find the complete list of nominees at Locus Online.
Octavia Butler and John Clute received the Solstice Award, and Black Gate blogger Bud Webster received the SFWA Service Award, for his tireless work with the Estate Project to track literary estates for deceased members of the science fiction community. Congratulations, Bud!