SOCIAL

Sad Puppies Propose Worldcon Invasion;  much discussion ensues

Spontaneous Knotting:  On Awards

Wikipedia Bans “Feminist” Editors

Guardians of the Galaxy Was PERFECT, Until James Gunn Mentioned This

ENTERTAINMENT

I Ain’t Afraid of No…Robopocalypse

The Draw of SF Romance (via SF Signal)

Pulp Fanzines!

Praising Indie…Bookstores

Wicked Women of Comics

Got Five Bucks?  Here’s 150 Books for $3.99 or less

Ed Harris Reprises Yul ‘Baldie’ Brenner’s Role

German Fanzine

Hartwell Vows Never To Watch Stupid SF Movies (Good Vow)

INDUSTRY

The Third Annual Stella Awards

New Classics For Kids

Is Amazon the Reader’s Friend?  Not After This Debate

HWA Announces Jack Ketchum & Tanith Lee As 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award Winners (see press release below)

Philip K. Dick Film Fest Winners

Apex Mag Story of the Year Winner

Aeon Award Announced

Jamie Bishop Memorial Award

Bad Contracts

SCIENCE

Oh Noes!  Giant Asteroid To Fly Within 3 Billion, 933 Million, 6 Hundred Thousand Feet of Earth!!!

We can now read scrolls charred and buried by volcanic action (ain’t science great!?)

The Family Stone Down Under:  Father & Son team working on spaceplane

Brain Scans Revealing Idiosyncrasies of Autism

Enterprise In Drydock

Live On Mars – 11 Years Later

Tiny Satellites (Looks LIke They’re Modeled After 2001)

All Hail The Mighty Hypno-Squids

Watch THREE Moons Cross the Face of Jupiter

PRESS RELEASES & NEWSLETTERS

Night Shade Books, Aqueduct Press, Suvudu, Haikasoru, HWA

19th of January 2015 BREAKING NEWS: KING OF THE CRACKSMEN BY DENNIS O’FLAHERTY IS NOW AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE ON ALL MAJOR E-TAILERS! The year is 1877. Automatons and steam-powered dirigible gunships have transformed the nation in the aftermath of the Civil War. Everything on the other side of the Mississippi has been claimed for Russia. Lincoln is still president, having never been assassinated, but the former secretary of war Edwin Stanton is now the head of the Department of Public Safety, ruling with an iron fist as head of the country’s military.Liam McCool is a bad man, one of the best Irish cracksmen there is when it comes to robbery, cracking safes, and other sundry actives—until… read more

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The Monthly Aqueduct Elysium, nominated to 2014 Philip K. Dick Award Since seeing the light, Elysium has been enthusiastically received by readers and reviewers alike. We closed the year in celebration of Jennifer Marie Brissett’s debut novel about the transcendence of love and spirit. We are now thrilled to announce thatElysium is a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. The winner will be announced on April 3, 2015 at Norwescon 38.Congratulations, Jenn! New The Cascadia Subduction Zone out now We’re pleased to announce that the January issue of The Cascadia Subduction Zone is now available. It features an essay by Nisi Shawl; poems by Mary Alexandra Agner, Rose Lemberg, and Sonya Taaffe; artwork by Tahlia Day, and much more. Click on “Subscribe” to buy and access the new issue, or to purchase a subscription. Reading Pleasures series 2014 This year’s Reading Pleasures series, in which Aqueduct authors and contributors blog about their favourite reads, plays, movies, and more, now complete. You can conveniently access all contributions in one place. If you wonder what you should read next, look no further! New Conversation Pieces: Volumes 42 and 43

Three Songs for Roxy tells three inter-related tales centered around Kizzy, a foundling raised by a Romany Gypsy family in present-day Seattle, as she is about to be claimed by the aliens who left her to be raised as humans. Caren Gussoff’s new contribution to the Conversation Pieces series explores issues of identity, gender, sexuality, and what it means to be an outsider. You can purchase all Conversation Pieces e-books for $5.95 and paperbacks for the special price of $9. In this collection of thirty-six poems and one story, Rhysling Award-winning poet Sonya Taaffe traces the complex paths between the dead, memory, and living. A two-part cycle written over the course of seven years, Ghost Signs leads the reader through the underworld of myth to the hauntings of the present, where the shades of Sappho, Alan Turing, and Ludwig Wittgenstein exist alongside Charon, Dido, and The War of the Worlds.

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To ensure you continue to receive email from Del Rey Suvudu please add suvudu@email.atrandom.com to your address book. If you have difficulty viewing this email, click here.
	JANUARY 2015 From the Desk of Pierce BrownDear Readers,One of the best things about being an author is getting to meet and chat with readers like you. As great as it is to meet them in a massive convention hall, I’ve just had my first book tour and found it to be an even better way to connect!Admittedly, I was a bit hesitant to tour at first, because I thought (and still sorta think) it a little presumptuous to assume anyone would want my signature on a book.  But after this little jaunt, I have to say, there’s now a warm fuzzy spot in my heart for touring because of all the people I met who I wish would have sat at my lunch table in high school. For the rest of Pierce’s letter, click here! For the rest of Pierce’s letter, click here! Read a Sample of Pierce’s New Book, Golden Son!
	Each week we’re giving away the first 50 pages of an awesome Del Rey or Spectra book — for FREE! Check out the titles we premiered last month: HALF A KING by Joe Abercrombie Click here to read » THE GALAXY GAME by Karen Lord Click here to read » DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? by Philip K. Dick Click here to read »		COVERS REVEALED FOR DARK SCREAMS VOLUMES 2 AND 3Cemetery Dance magazine editors Brian James Freeman and Richard Chizmar return with two more great horror anthologies and now you can check out the cover reveals for both upcoming titles.Dark Screams: Volume 2 is on-sale March 3, 2015Dark Screams: Volume 3 is on-sale on May 12, 2015 Click here to see the awesome covers for Dark Screams Volumes 2 and 3
			GALAXY GAME AUTHOR KAREN LORD ON THE GREATER GAME Karen Lord, author of the recently published THE GALAXY GAME, wrote a guest essay discussing her approach to inventing the sport of “Wallrunning” forThe Galaxy Game, including considerations for how a sport influences the economy, culture, and politics of a city or nation. To read Karen Lord’s guest essay, click here
			SUVUDU UNIVERSE Are you a writer looking for more exposure for your blog or website? Or trying to find a platform to amplify your voice on all things SFF? Join the Suvudu Universe. You can hook up your existing site’s RSS feed, create a new blog just for us, or contribute straight through our dashboard. Check out Suvudu Universe Sign up to contribute to the Universe

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

VIZ MEDIA’S HAIKASORU LITERARY IMPRINT DEBUTS YUYA SATO’S EVOCATIVE NOVEL DENDERA

Moving Novel Debuts In February About An Elderly’s Woman’s Resilience And Discovery Of A Hidden Utopian Community After Society Casts Her Aside

San Francisco, CA, January 22, 2015 – VIZ Media’s Haikasoru imprint opens 2015 with its first release of the New Year. DENDERA is the stark and moving novel by award winning author Yuya Sato set to be published on February 17^th. An eBook edition also will debut on the same day for the Amazon Kindle, Apple’s iBooks Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook Book Store, the Kobo eBooks Store, and the Google Play store.

DENDERA focuses on an ancient Japanese practice of leading the elderly to die in the mountains during times of drought or famine in order to ensure enough resources are available for the next generation to survive. The book was inspired by the classic novel, The Ballad of Narayama by Shichiro Fukazawa, which was notably adapted into a feature film directed by Shohei Imamura and won the prestigious Palme d’Or award at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival. DENDERA was also turned into a feature film in 2011 that was directed by Daisuke Tengan, the son of director Shohei Imamura.

Haikasoru publishes some of the most compelling contemporary Japanese science fiction and fantasy stories for English-speaking audiences, and is the first imprint based in the U.S. dedicated to Japanese science fiction and fantasy in translation.

DENDERA  Print MSRP: $15.99 U.S. / $16.99 CAN  Available February 17^th

When Kayu Saitoh wakes up, she is in an unfamiliar place. Taken to a snowy mountainside, she was left there by her family and her village according to the tradition of sacrificing the lives of the elderly for the benefit of the young. Kayu was supposed to have passed quickly into the afterlife. Instead, she finds herself in Dendera, a utopian community built over decades by old women who, like her, were abandoned. Together, they must now face a new threat: a hungry mother bear.

“DENDERA is a captivating work that presents a strong female lead character and evocative story based around ubasute, the custom of leaving the elderly to die via exposure, a recurring theme in Japanese literature,” says Nick Mamatas, Editor. “This fabulist tale will be of interest to both fans of fantasy and literary fiction.”

Author Yuya Sato was born 1980 and is a writer of “strange fiction,” which features fantastic or horrific concepts treated in a refined literary style. Some of his short works of fiction have appeared in English in the mixed manga/prose anthology series Faust. His novel 1000 Novels and Backbeard won the Yukio Mishima Prize, one of Japan’s highest literary awards. 

For additional information DENDERA and the Haikasoru imprint, please visit the dedicated website at www.haikasoru.com.

About VIZ Media, LLC

Headquartered in San Francisco, California, VIZ Media distributes, markets and licenses the best anime and manga titles direct from Japan.  Owned by three of Japan’s largest manga and animation companies, Shueisha Inc., Shogakukan Inc., and Shogakukan-Shueisha Productions, Co., Ltd., VIZ Media has the most extensive library of anime and manga for English speaking audiences in North America, the United Kingdom, Ireland and South Africa. With its popular digital manga anthology WEEKLY SHONEN JUMP and blockbuster properties like NARUTO, BLEACH and ONE PIECE, VIZ Media offers cutting-edge action, romance and family friendly properties for anime, manga, science fiction and fantasy fans of all ages.  VIZ Media properties are available as graphic novels, DVDs, animated television series, feature films, downloadable and streaming video and a variety of consumer products.  Learn more about VIZ Media, anime and manga at www.VIZ.com.

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Press Release: HWA Announces Jack Ketchum and Tanith Lee as 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award Winners
// SF Signal

The Horror Writer’s Association has announced Jack Ketchum and Tanith Lee as 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award Winners!

Here’s the press release:

HWA ANNOUNCES JACK KETCHUM AND TANITH LEE AS 2015 LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD WINNERS

The Horror Writers Association (HWA), the premier organization of writers and publishers of horror and dark fantasy and home of the iconic Bram Stoker Awards®, today announced Jack Ketchum and Tanith Lee as the 2015 recipients of the Bram Stoker Award® for Lifetime Achievement. The HWA presents the award annually to individuals whose work has substantially influenced the horror genre. While the award is often presented to a writer, it may also be given for influential accomplishments in other creative fields.

“We had a wealth of very worthy candidates for this award,” said John R. Little, jury chairperson of the Lifetime Achievement Award (LAA) committee. “After much discussion, we believe we agreed on two exceptional winners this year.”

Jack Ketchum has been one of the premiere authors in the horror field for many years. His novel The Girl Next Door is considered a classic, but he’s written many other equally deeply moving works. Ketchum has won the Bram Stoker Award® four times and been nominated an additional three times, showing the broad appeal to his audience. He was named the Grandmaster at the 2011 World Horror Convention.

Tanith Lee has written more than ninety novels in various fields, including horror, fantasy, and science fiction. She is very popular regardless of the genre she chooses to write in. She has won several World Fantasy and British Fantasy Awards, and in 2013 was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the World Fantasy Convention.

“Jack and Tanith remain extremely popular authors today,” said HWA President Lisa Morton, “and the Horror Writers Association is proud to bestow the Lifetime Achievement Award on them.”

Ketchum will be on-hand to accept the award (Lee will accept via video), on the evening of Saturday, May 9, 2015 as part of a gala banquet and the presentation of the Bram Stoker Awards during the World Horror Convention in Atlanta, Georgia. Tickets to the banquet and the convention are on sale to the public at https://www.whc2015.org. The awards presentation will also be live-streamed online for those who cannot attend in person.

The 2015 Lifetime Achievement Committee was chaired by John R Little, and included Maria Alexander, Patrick Freivald, Aaron Sterns and Heather Graham. For more information on the Bram Stoker Awards presentation and the 2015 World Horror Convention, please visit https://www.whc2015.org.

THE HORROR WRITERS ASSOCIATION is a nonprofit organization of writers and publishing professionals around the world, dedicated to promoting dark literature and the interests of those who write it. The HWA formed in 1985 with the help of many of the field’s greats, including Dean Koontz, Robert McCammon, and Joe Lansdale. Today, with over 1250 members around the globe, it is the oldest and most respected professional organization for the much-loved writers who have brought you the most enjoyable sleepless nights of your life.

One of HWA’s missions is to encourage public interest in and foster an appreciation of good Horror and Dark Fantasy literature. The organization offers public areas of its site, www.horror.org; sponsors or takes part in public readings and lectures; publishes a monthly newsletter for members; maintains outreach to booksellers, librarians, fans and readers; facilitates readings and signings by horror writers; offers scholarships; and maintains an official presence at the major fan-based horror and fantasy conventions, such as the World Horror Convention, and literary festivals.

For more information on the HWA, please visit www.Horror.org