PRESS RELEASES & NEWSLETTERS (see below for full text)
WSFA Elgin Awards
Gollancz: Brandon Sanderson’s Steelheart
Night Shade Books – Best Horror of the Year 5, Datlow & Zero Point, Asher
CAUSES
Arab Christians Being Persecuted in Egypt
Abortion Clinics Shutting Down Nationwide
Black America: Progress? (Via the Black Science Fiction Society)
FANDOM
SPOKANE selected as 2015 Worldcon Site
Detroit selected for 2014 NASFiC Site
Robert Pattinson wonders what Twilight Fans Do All Day (this is the guy who said “When I read it, it seemed like it was a book that wasn’t supposed to be published.”
AWARDS
WSFA Small Press Award Finalists
SF Poetry Association’s Elgin Award Winners
SF Translation Awards (see PR & News letters below for details)
ENTERTAINMENT
Massively Individual Online Gaming – Wave of the Future?
Voluted Tales, Latest Issue
NY Review of SF Hits 300 Issues – Read for Free
How to Make Brainy Martians (Mars Attacks Process Video)
Goram Shiny! Firefly Comic
TangentOnline Presents X Minus One: The Parade (OTR)
Surprising Stories September Issue Now Available
SCIENCE
Mutants Are Among Us (Paging Dr. Xavier, Dr. Moe, Dr. Larry…)
David Brin Wants You to Play in Traffic
The Venus Project: A New Society for the Future?
Armstrong Tribute
INDUSTRY
“I’m sick and tired of ‘he said’,” he said. Or, “…,” ranted Hancock
Self-Publish for Almost Nothing
SFWA Authors Attending Baltimore Book Festival (via Michael Walsh of Old Earth Books)
Is Your Ebook Done? Probably Not… (via SF Signal)
PRESS RELEASES & NEWSLETTERS
Elgin Awards
The Washington Science Fiction Association is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2013 WSFA Small Press Award for Short Fiction (published in 2012):
“Astrophilia” by Carrie Vaughn, published in Clarkesworld Magazine, edited by Neil Clarke (July 2012).
“The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” by Ken Liu, published in Lightspeed Magazine, edited by John Joseph Adams (August 2012).
“Bottled Spirits” by Pamela K. Kinney, published in Buzzy Mag, edited by Laura Anne Gilman (June, 2012).
“Coca Xocolatl” by Lawrence M. Schoen, published in ReDeus: Divine Tales, edited by Robert Greenberger and Aaron Rosenberg (Crazy Eight Press 2012).
“Good Hunting” by Ken Liu, published in Strange Horizons, edited by Brit Mandelo (October 2012).
“Mornington Ride” by Jason Nahrung, published in Epilogue, edited by Tehani Wessely (Fablecroft Publishing June 2012).
“The Six Million Dollar Mermaid” by Hildy Silverman, published in Mermaids 13: Tales from the Sea, edited by John L. French (Padwolf Publishing Inc. December 2012)
The award honors the efforts of small press publishers in providing a critical venue for short fiction in the area of speculative fiction. The award showcases the best original short fiction published by small presses in the previous year (2012). An unusual feature of the selection process is that all voting is done with the identity of the author and publisher hidden so that the final choice is based solely on the quality of the story.
The winner is chosen by the members of the Washington Science Fiction Association (wsfa.org) and will be presented at their annual convention, Capclave (capclave.org), held this year on October 11-13 in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
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Gollancz Geeks
Hi Geeks,
We have an especially awesome treat for you this month, and as you know, we’re pretty awesome at treats as it is. At the end of September, we will publish bestselling author Brandon Sanderson’s first book in a new, action-packed thrill ride of a series, and we’re giving you the chance to read it before anyone else. This is an absolute must-read from one of the biggest names in fantasy.
But what is Steelheart all about? Well . . .
Ten years ago, Calamity came. It was a burst in the sky that gave ordinary men and women extraordinary powers. The awed public started calling them Epics. But Epics are no friend of man. With incredible gifts came the desire to rule. And to rule man you must crush his wills.
Nobody fights the Epics . . . nobody but the Reckoners. A shadowy group of ordinary humans, they spend their lives studying Epics, finding their weaknesses, and then assassinating them.
And David wants in. He wants Steelheart – the Epic who is said to be invincible. The Epic who killed David’s father. For years, like the Reckoners, David’s been studying, and planning – and he has something they need. Not an object, but an experience.
He’s seen Steelheart bleed. And he wants revenge.
We have 30 copies to give away to 30 lucky Geeks. If you would like one, please reply to this email no later than midnight on Wednesday 4th September 2013. We’ll pick 30 of you at random to receive a copy.
Everyone who sends back a review to us before the deadline will receive their exclusive Gollancz Geeks t-shirt, bookmark and badge by way of thanks. We reserve the right to publish your review on the Gollancz blog, but if you’d rather not go public then do let us know in your return email.
If you’d no longer like to be on Team Gollancz Geeks, simply reply to this email letting us know and we will remove you from the list.
We’re looking forward to seeing what you have to say about Steelheart!
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(Available on All Major e-tailers!)
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Available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble
 Darkness, both literal and psychological, holds its own unique fascination. Despite our fears, or perhaps because of them, readers have always been drawn to tales of death, terror, madness, and the supernatural, and no more so than today when a wildly imaginative new generation of dark dreamers is carrying on in the tradition of Poe and Lovecraft and King, crafting exquisitely disturbing literary nightmares that gaze without flinching into the abyss-and linger in the mind long after. Multiple award-winning editor Ellen Datlow knows the darkest corners of fiction and poetry better than most. Once again, she has braved the haunted landscape of modern horror to seek out the most chilling new works by both legendary masters of the genre and fresh young talents. Here are twisted hungers and obsessions, human and otherwise, along with an unsettling variety of spine-tingling fears and fantasies. The cutting edge of horror has never cut deeper than in this comprehensive showcase of the very best the field has to offer. Enter at your own risk.
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Available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble
Earth’s Zero Asset citizens no longer face extermination from orbit. Thanks to Alan Saul, the Committee’s network of control is a smoking ruin and its robotic enforcers lie dormant. But power abhors a vacuum and, scrambling from the wreckage, comes the ruthless Serene Galahad. She must act while the last vestiges of Committee infrastructure remain intact – and she has the means to ensure command is hers. On Mars, Var Delex fights for the survival of Antares Base, while the Argus Space Station hurls towards the red planet. And she knows whomever, or whatever, trashed Earth is still aboard. Var must save the base, while also dealing with the first signs of rebellion. And aboard Argus Station, Alan Saul’s mind has expanded into the local computer network. In the process, he uncovers the ghastly experiments of the Humanoid Unit Development, the possibility of eternal life, and a madman who may hold the keys to interstellar flight. But Earth’s agents are closer than Saul thinks, and the killing will soon begin.
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Winners Of the 2013 SF&F Translation Awards
Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards
PO Box 64128, Sunnyvale CA 94088-4128 USA
info@sfftawards.org; https://www.sfftawards.org/
August 24, 2013
Winners Of the 2013 SF&F Translation Awards
The Association for the Recognition of Excellence in SF & F Translation (ARESFFT) is delighted to announce the winners of the 2013 Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards (for works published in 2012). There are two categories: Long Form and Short Form. The jury has additionally elected to award three honorable mentions in each category.
Long Form Winner
Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City by Kai-cheung Dung, translated from the Chinese by Anders Hansson, Bonnie S. McDougall, and the author (Columbia University Press)
Long Form Honorable Mentions
Belka, Why Don’t You Bark? by Hideo Furukawa, translated from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich (Haikasoru)
Kaytek the Wizard by Janusz Korczak, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Penlight)
Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, translated from the Russian by Olena Bormashenko (Chicago Review Press)
Short Form Winner
“Augusta Prima” by Karin Tidbeck translated from the Swedish by the author (Jagannath: Stories, Cheeky Frawg)
Short Form Honorable Mentions
“Every Time We Say Goodbye” by Zoran Vlahović, translated from the Croatian by Tatjana Jambrišak, Goran Konvićni, and the author (Kontakt: An Anthology of Croatian SF, Darko Macan and Tatjana Jambrišak, editors, SFera)
“A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight” by Xia Jia, translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu (Clarkesworld #65)
“A Single Year” by Csilla Kleinheincz, translated from the Hungarian by the author (The Apex Book of World SF #2, Lavie Tidhar, editor, Apex Book Company)
The winners were announced today at Liburnicon 2013 <https://liburnicon.org/en/>, held in Opatija, Croatia, over the weekend August 23-25. The awards were announced by ARESFFT Board member Cheryl Morgan and convention Guest of Honor, Jacqueline Carey. Zoran Vlahović was in the audience.
The winning authors and their translators will each receive an inscribed plaque and a cash prize of $350. Authors and translators of the honorable mentions will receive certificates.
“Anyone who doubts the vitality of worldwide science fiction and fantasy,” said Gary K. Wolfe, President of ARESFFT, “could do worse than to use this impressive list of winners and honorable mentions as a reading list. The breadth and variety of the translated works themselves, as well as their venues of publication, attest to the valuable efforts of many to bring a genuine international dimension to genres that have sometimes (and sometimes accurately) been described as provincial in attitude.”
The money for the prize fund was obtained primarily through a generous donation by Society for the Furtherance & Study of Fantasy & Science Fiction (SF3) < https://sf3.org/>. SF3 is the parent non-profit corporation of Wiscon < https://wiscon.info/>, the feminist science fiction convention.
The jury for the awards was James & Kathryn Morrow (Chairs); Felice Beneduce, Alexis Brooks de Vita, Stefan Ekman, Martha Hubbard, Ekaterina Sedia, Kari Sperring, and Aishwarya Subramanian. Comments from the jury on the chosen works follow.
Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City
In praising Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City, Jurist Kari Sperring called it a “hugely innovative, playful, intensely political, accomplished book, and the best piece of fantastical history/historiography I have ever read. The translation is excellent, too: elegant, fluent, and lively. I applaud the preservation of Cantonese pronunciation (a decision which is itself a political act). Moreover, novel and translation are actively engaged with each other—the act of translation has produced changes in the Chinese as well as the English texts.”
“Disrupting the concept of the novel,” Jurist Alexis Brooks de Vita wrote of Atlas, “irresistibly quotable, Dung Kai-cheung’s amazingly yearning creation of short chapters toys with conceptions of place and being, with feeling and mythmaking, centered in the fictional story of one of the most painfully politicized cities still in existence in the world.”
For Jurist Aishwarya Subramanian, Atlas is a book that “clearly delights in its own cleverness.” But beyond the breathtaking inventiveness, she found the text “intensely political and engaged with the present – it’s fifteen years old, but it still feels to me contemporary and relevant.”
Co-chair Kathryn Morrow discovered in Atlas “a masterwork on the nature of translation itself. The prose is beautifully rendered into English, and the author’s essential subject is the process by which myth, legend, and fact translate themselves into human cultural artifacts.”
Jurist Martha Hubbard concluded, “This beautiful and elegiac book examines the very nature of how knowledge is created … The language is at once poetic and specific. The book is so moving, I would deeply love to own a proper copy to keep and cherish.”
Belka, Why Don’t You Bark?
Kari Sperring singled out Belka, Why Don’t You Bark? for its “thoughtful engagement with the issue of abandonment” and she also appreciated the author’s insights into “the consequences of globalization and social exclusion.” Kari argued that, while Belka presents itself “as military fiction and gritty crime drama,” the book is ultimately “a pacifist narrative.” She added, “The excellent translation negotiates the difficulty of a narrative that switches between third person and second person, past tense and present tense.”
In confronting Belka, Martha Hubbard noted that “this strange and compelling book grows on you. I think it is a powerful and brave attempt to comment on the aftermath of the wretched situation in the world after decades and decades of war.”
Kaytek the Wizard
Alexis Brooks de Vita found Kaytek the Wizard “sublimely poignant, as painful as it is raw, so obviously written by a man who loves childhood and children and uses fantasy to prepare them—and us—for fatality as well as mortality. Huckleberry Finn more than Tom Sawyer, reaching across a century-and-a-half to conjure Harry Potter, Kaytek’s loner protagonist finally becomes not only Frankenstein but his self-created monster, a childish Melmoth the Wanderer, made wise enough to have become capable of conveying the author’s historically heartbreaking final lines.”
Kathryn Morrow added, “This is a fresh, sophisticated, and psychologically authentic exemplar of the Bildungsroman type of fantasy. The author’s unique sensibility is well served by Lloyd-Jones’s lively translation.”
Roadside Picnic
Negotiating the new translation of Roadside Picnic, Jurist Felice Beneduce took pleasure in “the Raymond Chandleresque approach of the authors, whose writing oozes noir.” He added, “The notion of aliens being completely indifferent to the consequences of their actions and in essence their ‘trash’ is brilliant in my view.”Co-chair James Morrow was pleased to report that the Olena Bormashenko rendering of Roadside Picnic “restores scenes and sentences that, owing to the machinations of Soviet censorship, never appeared in Antonina W. Bouis’s earlier version.”
Martha Hubbard provided a personal coda. “As someone living in a region which had the dubious pleasure of hosting the Soviet Army’s roadside picnics, the picture posited of the mess they created and left behind is far too accurate.”
ARESFFT is a California Non-Profit Corporation funded entirely by donations
Contact
info@sfftawards.org; https://www.sfftawards.org/
