m. c. de marco

I’m back onto my schedule, interview with Jeff VanderMeer today, feedback later this week!

On Locus. Here

From ScienceFiction.com we learn that Gene Wolfe will be receiving this award.

All details HERE

John Scalzi, SFWA President, takes time out to remind those of you who possess dem0n powers that the time to cast your spells ballots for NEBULA nominations is quickly coming to a close.

You can read his appeal to your better natures HERE.

(He also hastens to remind the acolytes that HUGO nominations are coming to a close also.

Back in the day, when I worked at a company, with a cube, and a 401(k), and bosses that expected respect and stuff, I had a friend. She was pretty high up in the company, very well respected, but bubbly, friendly, not at all intimidating. I admired her.

In her office, she had above her [...]

Listener Heather Muir sent me her Scrivener review, and I thought I’d link it here.

Now that I’ve been using Scrivener for a year, I feel ready to review it. I bought it when I won NaNoWriMo last year and got the 50% discount. Best. Purchase. Ever. The great thing about Scrivener is [...]

Victoria Blake of Underland Press sent out a notice today, sharing the press’ (and no doubt the author’s) giddy pride:

From Underland -

Our stellar new novel from Matthew Hughes was just nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award.

This is HUGE!

To date, we’ve been nominated for the Nebula, the Hugo, the Shirley Jackson, the ALA, and the Foreword book of the year. Adding PKD to the mix just tickles us so… I mean, PKD was the progenitor, the alpha, the reason we’re all here. We’re feeling the love.

Don’t know Matthew Hughes? He’s been called the heir apparent to Jack Vance. George R.R. Martin said that his books are, “a tremendous amount of fun.”

The Other brings us Luff Imbry , an insidiously clever confidence man who likes good wine and good stolen goods. He always maintains the upper hand. When business rivals get the drop on him, he finds himself abandoned on an isolated world, where every stranger is an enemy. Imbry has to rely on his infamous criminal wit to survive Fulda’s crusade to extinguish the Other.

Read it, read it! And tell your friends!

Victoria Blak

Proud Publisher

Underland Press

She also included a link to an interview with the author here, as well as a link to some of the author’s work here.

The Philip K. Dick Awards are presented annually at the Philcon convention, and are awarded for works originally published in paperback.

We’ve received the following words regarding the Romanian Galileo Awards from Horia Nicola Ursu:

The subscribers of Romania’s only  printed F&SF magazine, Galileo Science Fiction & Fantasy, have started voting for their favourites in the competition for the 2012 Galileo Awards (established last year).
The nominees are:
Best F&SF Book (Novel or Story Collection):

• Bogdan-Tudor Bucheru – Anotimpurile
• ?tefana Cristina Czeller – Cerneal? ?i sînge, Millennium Books
• Dan Dobo? – Demnet, Media-Tech
• Costi Gurgu – Cronici de la cap?tul p?mîntului, Millennium Books
• Liviu Radu – Singur pe Ormuza, Millennium Books

Best Short F&SF Fiction category:

• Aron Biro – Profe?ii despre trecut (din antologia Steampunk: A doua revolu?ie editat? de Adrian Cr?ciun, Millennium Books)
• Oliviu Crâznic – Ultima clepsidr? (din antologia Steampunk: A doua revolu?ie editat? de Adrian Cr?ciun, Millennium Books)
• Costi Gurgu – Mla?tinile din sud (din volumul Cronici de la cap?tul P?mîntului, Millennium Books)
• Costi Gurgu – Cetatea neagr? (din antologia Steampunk: A doua revolu?ie editat? de Adrian Cr?ciun, Millennium Books)
• Michael Haulic? – O huc? în minunatul Inand (din revista Galileo nr.3)
• Michael Haulic? – Povestea lui Calistrat Hadîmbu din Vizireni, ucis mi?ele?te de nenicul Raul Colentina într-un han de la marginea Bucure?tilor (din antologia Steampunk: A doua revolu?ie editat? de Adrian Cr?ciun, Millennium Books)
• George Laz?r – De la ?igani (din antologia Steampunk: A doua revolu?ie editat? de Adrian Cr?ciun, Millennium Books)

Best F&SF Anthology:

• Steampunk: A doua revolu?ie – editor: Adrian Cr?ciun – Millennium, 2011
• Venus – editor: Antuza Genescu – Eagle & SRSFF, 2011
• Balaurul ?i Miori?a – editor: Mihail Gr?mescu – Eagle, 2011
• Pangaia – editor: SRSFF – Eagle & SRSFF, 2010
• Premiile Galileo 2011 – editor: Horia Nicola Ursu – Millennium, 2011

The voting will close on March 3, and the winners will be announced during the Final Frontier F&SF Bookfair, which will take place in Bucharest, March 17-18.

As best I can tell from my broken-Romanian estimates, it looks like a Steampunk anthology is getting a lot of nods….not to mention our letter write who is up for an editor’s award.

Good luck to all of our Romanian friends!

So I had to leave Dreamhost because they were charging me an arm and a leg for a virtual server, a tool they said I needed because of too many database queries – which never worked anyway.

Yes, I installed caching plugins.

So before I switched, I contacted the people at Fatcow and said, “Here’s [...]

Thanks to the movements of Mary Robinette Kowal, February is deemed the Month of Letters. She challenges people to hand write letters every day this month, and has created a site (see above) where people can exchange addresses.

Yes, this is real letter writing, not emails.

I have horrible handwriting, but have loved [...]

Via the SFSite, we learn that Nicola Griffith has won the first annual Galactica Suburbia Award for her Joanna Russ pledge and other online work.

The award is presented for the first time by the Galactica Suburbia podcast for “activism and/ or communication that advances the feminist conversation in the field of speculative fiction”

Seven others have been noted as receiving Honors from the podcast group as well.  Read the details here

As I mentioned, I’m going back to school, and this is from the middle of my January residency. I’m tired and loopy and with other students.

Hey guys- because of time taken off, I have some interviews from last fall backed up, and I need to get them out. I am not doing any new interviews for a while, will let people know when I’m open to the idea again.

My Stonecoast podcast will go up today.

Monday, January 23, 2012

Chicago, Illinois, USA – Chicon 7, the 70th World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon), today issued a reminder that the deadline is fast approaching to gain the right to nominate for the 2012 Hugo Awards and John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

To be entitled to submit a nomination ballot you must join Chicon 7 or LoneStarCon 3 (the 2013 Worldcon) as a Supporting, Attending, or Young Adult member by January 31, 2012, or have been a Supporting or Attending member of Renovation, the 2011 Worldcon. Nomination ballots must be received by Sunday, March 11, 2012, 23:59 PDT.

After the finalists are announced, all Supporting, Attending, and Young Adult members of Chicon 7 (including all members who join prior to the closing date of the final ballot) will be invited to submit ballots to select the Hugo winners. Chicon 7 members will also be eligible to nominate for the 2013 Hugo Awards to be hosted next year by LoneStarCon 3, the 71st Worldcon, in San Antonio, Texas.

The Hugo Awards are the premier award in the science fiction genre, honoring literature, art, and media as well as the genre’s fans. The Hugo Awards were first presented at the 1953 World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia (Philcon II), and they have continued to honor science fiction and fantasy notables for nearly 60 years.

In addition to the fifteen existing award categories, Chicon 7 has also exercised its right to create an additional, one-time Hugo Award. Chicon 7 will therefore be presenting the first ever Hugo for “Best Fancast” to recognize the wide variety of high quality, non-professional audio- and video-casts which are now being produced.

More information about the Hugo Awards, including details about how to submit a nominating ballot, is available from www.chicon.org/hugo-awards.php.

For additional information, contact us at hugoadmin@chicon.org.

ENDS

Chicon 7 is the 2012 World Science Fiction Convention (“Worldcon”). The first Worldcon occurred in New York City in 1939 and Worldcons have been held annually since then except for 1942-45 when there was no event due to World War II. Chicon 7′s Guests of Honor are five-time Hugo winning author Mike Resnick, artist Rowena Morrill, art agent and collector Jane Frank, science fiction fan and former Worldcon chair Peggy Rae Sapienza, and astronaut Story Musgrave. Chicon 7′s Toastmaster is John Scalzi.

For more details about the convention or to purchase memberships, visit www.chicon.org. Send press questions, or requests to be removed from the Chicon 7 press release mailing list, to

. Send general queries to

. “World Science Fiction Society,” “WSFS,” “World Science Fiction Convention,” “Worldcon,” “NASFiC,” “Hugo Award,” and the distinctive design of the Hugo Award Rocket are service marks of the World Science Fiction Society, an unincorporated literary society.

Niall Harrison, editor of Strange Horizons magazine, has posted a look at several 2011 awards, including his pics for those works he expects to see on various shortlists.

Niall starts out with some commentary and reaction to Ursula Le Guin’s article on the subject that I covered here a while back.

Editor Harrison is certainly in a better position than most to make predictions;  that he is willing to make them in public is a bit unusual and deserving of attention.

Thanks to Jared Shurin of the Kitschies for the heads up.

Tom Hunter – the Arthur C. Clarke Award Director – discusses the plethora of science fiction awards (and why that’s not a bad thing) and pays particular attention to the relatively new Kitschie Awards and their uncanny predictive powers.

You can read the article on the HuffingtonPost here.

The British Science Fiction Awards nominees have been announced. The awards will be presented at Eastercon in April.

Best Novel

• Cyber Circus, by Kim Lakin-Smith
• Embassytown, by China Miéville
• The Islanders, by Christopher Priest
• By Light Alone, by Adam Roberts
• Osama, by Lavie Tidhar

Best Short Fiction

• “The Silver Wind,” by Nina Allan
• “The Copenhagen Interpretation,” by Paul Cornell
• “Afterbirth,” by Kameron Hurley
• “Covehithe,” by China Miéville
• “Of Dawn,” by Al Robertson

Best Non-Fiction

• Out of This World: Science Fiction But Not as We Know It, by Mike Ashley
• The SF Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition, edited by John Clute, Peter Nicholls, & David Langford
• Review of Arslan, by M.J. Engh & Abigail Nussbaum
• SF Mistressworks, edited by Ian Sales
• Pornokitsch, edited by Jared Shurin & Anne Perry,
• The Unsilent Library: Essays on the Russell T. Davies Era of the New Doctor Who, by Graham Sleight, Tony Keen, & Simon Bradshaw

Best Art

• cover for The Noise Revealed, by Dominic Harman
• cover for A Monster Calls, by Jim Kay
• cover for Osama, by Pedro Marques
• cover for A Glass of Shadow, by Anne Sudworth

Via Steven H Silver/SF Site News

FINALISTS ANNOUNCED FOR THE 2011 KITSCHIES, PRESENTED BY THE KRAKEN RUM

The Kitschies are proud to announce the finalists for the year’s most progressive, intelligent and entertaining works of genre literature.

The shortlisted books for the Red Tentacle (for novel):

• The Enterprise of Death by Jesse Bullington (Orbit)
• Embassytown by China Miéville (Tor)
• A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness and Siobhan Dowd (Walker Books)
• The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers (Sandstone)
• Osama: A Novel by Lavie Tidhar (PS Publishing)

The shortlisted books for the Golden Tentacle (for debut):

• Among Thieves by Douglas Hulick (Tor)
• God’s War by Kameron Hurley (Night Shade Books)
• The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (Harvill Secker)
• Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs (Quirk)
• The Samaritan by Fred Venturini (Blank Slate Press)

The shortlisted books for the Inky Tentacle (for cover art):

• Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch; illustration by Stephen Walter, design by Patrick Knowles (TAG Fine Arts) (Gollancz)
• The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan; design by Peter Mendelsund (Canongate)
• The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco; design by Suzanne Dean, illustration by John Spencer (Harvill Secker)
• Equations of Life by Simon Morden; design by Lauren Panepinto (Orbit)
• A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness and Siobhan Dowd; illustration by Jim Kay (Walker Books)

The winning author of the Red Tentacle will receive a £750 prize; the winners of the Golden Tentacle and Inky Tentacles each receive £250. All three will also receive iconic, hand-made Tentacle trophies.

All the finalists receive a bottle of The Kraken Rum.

This shortlisted titles were selected from a list of over 150 submissions received from 38 publishers and imprints.

The winners will be announced on February 3, 2011 at an award ceremony to be held at the SFX Weekender 3.

Award Director Anne C. Perry said:

“Our goal in creating this award was not just to bridge the gap between genre and literature but to prove that there’s no gap at all. And we feel that 2011 has gone a long way towards illustrating that. We’re tremendously delighted by the passion we’ve seen from the authors, editors, publishers and fans – all of whom have contributed to make this an extraordinary year for The Kitschies.”

Red and Golden Tentacle Judge (and 2010 Red Tentacle winner) Lauren Beukes said:

“It’s been a fraught and bloody process winnowing the nominees down to shortlists of just five, involving passionate fan-rants, general geekery, some very silly jokes and occasional outbreaks of threatened violence between the judges.

2011 produced some remarkable novels. These are the ones that stood out for all of us, according to The Kitschies’ criteria: books that were inventive, playful and smart, packed with intriguing ideas, great characters and nudged at the boundaries of things, or overturned them altogether.

I suspect getting consensus on the ultimate winners is going to turn into even more of a knife-fight. A battle to which I fully intend to bring a mecha armed with autocannons.”

Inky Judge Hayley Campbell added:

“As we sorted through the mountain of submissions, we were glad to see our old pals the hooded druids, the snarling werewolves, and the miscellaneous bit of unfathomably large spaceship – we cast them a friendly wave as we sorted them out of the pile.

We were looking for stuff that went beyond the obvious, the kind of cover that would not relegate a book to the dark forgotten corner of the bookshop where the monsters live. What we were left with was an astonishingly diverse collection of covers, and an even more diverse collection of opinions.”

The judging panel for the Red and Golden Tentacles is:

• Lauren Beukes (2010 Red Tentacle winner for Zoo City)
• Rebecca Levene
• Anne C. Perry
• Jared Shurin

The judging panel for the Inky Tentacle is:

• Darren Banks
• Hayley Campbell
• Catherine Hemelryk
• Craig Kennedy
• Anne C. Perry

Thanks to File770 (original story here), we learn that the Munsey Award, presented at Pulpfest (and given to “the most worthy” by Pulpfest peers), has been renamed in honor of Rusty Hevelin, one of the “stalwarts” of Pulpfest.

The award will now become the Rusty Hevelin Service Award or, the Rusty.

Via File 770 -

Fans may now submit nominations for the 2012 Fan Activity Achievement Awards. These awards honor the best in fan writing, drawing, publishing and posting for the calendar year 2011.

The full story here

and the ballot HERE