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Jared Pechaček’s The West Passage (Tor) won this year’s the Crawford Award, presented at the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando FL on March 22, 2025. The award jury received 59 submissions from over 30 publishers, by authors from 20 different countries. Eleven of the submitted novels were translations. Judges were Brian Attebery, Eddie Clark, Candas Jane Dorsey, Mimi Mondal, and Yilin Wang.

The administrator was ...Read More

Author L.J. Smith, 66, died March 8, 2025 in Danville CA after a long illness. Smith was best known for the bestselling Vampire Diaries series and the Night World series.

Lisa Jane Smith was born September 4, 1958 in Fort Lauderdale FL and grew up in Villa Park in Southern California. She attended the University of California, Santa Barbara and San Francisco State University, and worked for three years as ...Read More

The shortlist for the 2025 International Dylan Thomas Prize has been announced. The six-title list includes Rapture’s Road by Seán Hewitt (Jonathan Cape) and Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon (Fig Tree).

The annual Dylan Thomas prize, in partnership with Swansea University, awards £20,000 “to the best eligible published literary work in the English language, written by an author aged 39 or under.” This year’s judges are Jan Carson, Mary Jean

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The shortlist for the 2024 British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Awards has been announced.

Best Novel

• Calypso, Oliver K. Langmead (Titan)
• Rabbit in the Moon, Fiona Moore (Epic)
• Alien Clay, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Orbit)
• Three Eight One, Aliya Whiteley (Solaris)

Best Shorter Fiction (for novelettes and novellas)

• Navigational Entanglements, Aliette de Bodard (Tordotcom)
• “What Happened at the Pony Club”, Fiona Moore (Fusion Fragment 8/24)
• Saturation Point

...Read More

L.D. Lewis has announced Ibtisam Barakat and Monir Mtoor (Nissan Al-Jalele) as the winners of the inaugural 2025 Watermelon Grant. This grant “offers $2000 USD in unrestricted funds to an emerging Palestinian creator in the field of speculative arts.” The award will allow entry to different artistic media in different yearly cycles, including literary, visual, and performing artists. This year, it names Barakat the winner in poetry and Mtoor the ...Read More

The Climate Fiction Prize has announced its inaugural shortlist. Founded by Rose Goddard, Imran Khan, and Leo Barasi and supported by Climate Spring, the prize seeks to “celebrate the most inspiring novels tackling the climate crisis.”

Shortlisted titles and authors of genre interest include The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Sceptre), Briefly Very Beautiful by Roz Dineen (Bloomsbury Circus), Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape), and The Morningside by ...Read More

Anathema has announced a call for co-editors via Bluesky, saying they are “moving forward with plans for Anathema 2.0, and we would like to bring on more co-editors who are committed to the magazine’s longevity.” New co-editors will produce the magazine with Liza Wemakor, Lysz Flo, and Plangdi Neple.

Anathema: Spec from the Margins was launched in 2017 by Michael Matheson & Andrew Wilmot. The publication received numerous accolades from ...Read More

The 12-title longlists for the Jhalak Prose Prize, Jhalak Children’s & Young Adult Prize, and the new Jhalak Poetry Prize have been announced.

The awards “seek to celebrate books by writers of colour in the UK and Ireland.” The prize awards £1000 to each winner, along with “a unique work of art created by artists chosen for the annual Jhalak Art Residency.”

The longlist features several titles and authors of ...Read More

by Michael Capobianco

I first encountered Jerry Pournelle in the early 80s on the pages of the computer professional magazine Byte, where he had a column called “Chaos Manor.” I had just purchased an expensive Texas Instruments 99/4 home computer and was writing some primitive game software for it with friends from college. Jerry’s column was generally the most readable part of the magazine, and it was written at my beginner level. Strangely, it seemed to always consist of Pournelle writing about some new piece of software or hardware that he couldn’t get to work. That was pretty common in those days when computers were new and compatibility was often a problem. Most importantly, though, he was a science fiction writer and was writing on a computer, something I aspired to do but which seemed beyond reach.

Jump forward ten years to when I had figured out how to write on a computer and (significantly) how to print a manuscript for submission so it didn’t look like it was written on a computer. When that resulted in publication of a book co-written with William Barton, I joined SFWA, not knowing anything about it, and signed up for GEnie, a pre-internet phone modem bulletin board service run by General Electric that offered access to published science fiction and fantasy writers. It was jam-packed with SFF writers of every stripe. Almost immediately, I ran into Jerry in the private SFWA “roundtable.”

GEnie

I might jokingly say that on GEnie Jerry performed some of the same things he did in his computer columns, and there’s some truth to that. He had served as SFWA President from 1973 to 1974, chaired SFWA’s Grievance Committee (Griefcom) from 1974 to 1978, managed a reportedly very successful Nebula Awards Weekend in Los Angeles, and edited a Nebula Awards anthology. Jerry had founded SFWA’s Emergency Fund with Robert Silverberg, and they still managed it. He was oft-published both solo and in collaboration with Larry Niven and had been nominated for a Nebula twice. All of this gave him a vast experience of the organization in all its incarnations, more than anyone else on GEnie except Damon Knight, who primarily served as a provocateur. Jerry shared many anecdotes of SFWA’s past successes and controversies in a way that gave us new members a real glimpse of the organization’s history, filtered, as it was, through Jerry’s worldview. His perspective was firmly rooted in the idea that SFWA should be, first and foremost, concerned with the business of professional writing and was too often distracted by what he called “throwing parties and giving awards.” He strongly believed that SFWA’s admission criteria were too lax and was a participant in the ongoing “requal wars” that resurfaced in earnest in the organization every few years, focused on changing back to the earlier rule that Active (Full) membership required requalification based on continuing professional publication. 

First Lessons

Many of Jerry’s anecdotes on GEnie showed that SFWA had accomplished much, and some showed its sillier and/or more combative side. What did we learn? We learned that Somtow Sucharitkul’s cat had peed in his box of important SFWA documents when he was SFWA Secretary in the mid-80s (the loss of which still bedevils the organization today). We learned that SFWA had conducted a mass audit of Ace Books that turned up a lot of money owed to SFWA members. We learned that SFWA had intervened to help get J. R. R. Tolkien’s US rights to The Lord of the Rings back (see Part 1 and Part 2 of “A Brief History of SFWA: The Beginning”). We learned there had been a long and vicious fight over creating an official SFWA tie (don’t ask) and a Fellowship membership category. 

Some SFWA wounds were still open after many years and were a touchstone for the organization in some quarters. On GEnie, one controversy that was often referenced but never fully explained was the Lem Affair. SFWA had awarded Polish SF writer Stanislaw Lem an honorary membership and then, after Lem attacked American science fiction and amid a long internal fight, had retracted it. Whether the retraction was political or simply happened because giving it to Lem was in violation of the bylaws (or, most likely, a combination of both) is still debated. 

SFWA’s Victories

Some SFWA victories were still being celebrated. SFWA had successfully staged a boycott against Ultimate Publishing, publisher of Amazing Stories, when it started reprinting stories in its magazines without paying the authors. The publisher agreed to a flat rate at first and then a per-word rate, making it the first and most successful SFWA action of the sort (which would likely be a violation of US antitrust laws today). SFWA also took a stand against literary agent Scott Meredith acquiring editorial control of the well-regarded Timescape book publisher, claiming that there would be an obvious conflict of interest between the roles of agent and publisher. SFWA pursued several strategies to publicize the deal, and ultimately it was cancelled.

Jerry and Future History

Among other remarkable traits was Jerry’s consistency. He was able to repeat his stories and observations pretty close to verbatim year after year after year, first on GEnie, then on sff.net, and finally on the online SFWA Forum. That’s more than 25 years. His last post on the Forum (still visible to members) was made on September 7, 2017. He died a day later in his sleep of heart failure.

Robert Silverberg remembers him:

“Jerry Pournelle was a powerful figure in SFWA’s early years. His election as president drew some adverse comment, because he was the first president who had not had a major writing career—he had just begun selling SF and was a successor to such established pros as Poul Anderson, Gordon Dickson, and James Gunn. But very quickly he showed his mettle. In a conversation with me he listed, from memory, five areas where SFWA needed fixing, and he proceeded to fix them all.

“There was a problem with distribution of royalties from the various SFWA anthologies—the trustee in charge of sending out the money was being oddly obstreperous about paying it—and Jerry solved that in what we came to see was the Pournelle manner, by simply dissolving the trusteeship arrangement, thus leaving the recalcitrant trustee high and dry, and turning the distribution of royalties over to SFWA’s agent, Richard Curtis. Thinking that it was unfortunate that the best work of Robert A. Heinlein and other Golden Age writers had been done before the inception of the Nebulas in 1966, he invented the Grand Master award and gave the first one to Heinlein. (Others, like Williamson, Simak, and De Camp, received their awards in short order.)  In many other ways, Jerry operated in a brisk, no-nonsense manner, seeing to it that SFWA was financially stable and rationally administered.

“After I devised the Emergency Medical Fund, I chose Jerry as my co-administrator, he and I being close friends who saw eye to eye on many things, and for years thereafter the two of us ran the fund in complete harmony. He also gave me a good lesson in Christian compassion—Jerry was a religious man—when someone who was only marginal as a writer and had done Jerry actual harm in an area outside the SF world asked for an EMF grant, not for himself but for his wife, who was not even a writer. I voted against the grant, but Jerry, turning the other cheek, said that we should overlook the various negative factors of the application and approve it anyway, simply as a good deed.  I could not object to that.

“Jerry was hard of hearing and spoke in a very loud voice, which led some people to think that he was an unruly ruffian. He wasn’t. He was a splendid human being and I was happy to have enjoyed his friendship for so many years.”

I only met Jerry in person once, at a SFWA Business Meeting, and we were never friends. I often felt we were adversaries, but I realized at some point that a great deal of my understanding of what SFWA was and what it could be were formed in part by his SFWA anecdotes and arguments on the online boards. I’ve recently been appointed SFWA Historian, a daunting task without any particular duties. Still, I have a collection of SFWA publications and papers. I am working with SFWA’s History Committee to archive and preserve what I’ve collected at Northern Illinois University to make it safe from cat pee forever.

Michael Capobianco is co-author with William Barton of the SF books Iris, Alpha Centauri, Fellow Traveler, and White Light. He has published two solo science fiction novels, Burster and Purlieu, as well as short fiction. Capobianco was President of SFWA from 1996 to 1998 and again in 2007–2008. He currently serves as SFWA Historian in addition to chairing and co-chairing several SFWA committees.

The post Jerry Pournelle: SFWA Historian appeared first on SFWA.

The shortlist has been announced for the 2025 Kurd Laßwitz Preis. The prize is awarded to German-language SF works published in the previous year.

Best German SF Novel

• Der Riss, Andreas Brandhorst (Heyne)
• Wolfszone, Christian Endres (Heyne)
• Parts per Million, Theresa Hannig (Fischer Tor)
• Anahita, Sven Haupt (Eridanus)
• Lieferdienst, Tom Hillenbrand (Kiepenheuer & Witsch)
• Views, Marc-Uwe Kling (Ullstein)
• Apeirophobia, Christian J. Meier (Hirnkost)

...Read More

Baen Books has announced on social media the ten finalists for the 2025 Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award:

• Gustavo Bondoni
• Jason Crawford
• Deborah Davitt
• Meghan Feldman
• Ricardo Garcia
• Trent Guillory
• Gary Herring
• Joseph McGow-Russell
• Tom (T.S.) Ryker
• Tiffany Smith

The Grand Prize winner will be featured on the Baen website. The author will be given a trophy and paid professional rates.

Grand Prize, second, and third place winners each ...Read More

Convention organizer Guy Thomas, 67, died March 13, 2025.

Guy Wayne Thomas, born February 21, 1958, discovered science fiction fandom in college, in Carbondale IL. His first science fiction convention was the 1979 NaSFiC in Louisville KY. When he moved to the Bay Area, he built new connections with the northern California science fiction community, where he was especially known for his copious knowledge of and deep appreciation for his ...Read More

Lynne M. Thomas is stepping down as co-editor-in-chief and co-publisher of Uncanny after 11 years. Her cofounder Michael Damian Thomas will continue as sole editor-in-chief starting with issue 64 and as publisher starting with Issue 67. Lynne Thomas is “shifting her focus to her day job as she works towards her rare book librarianship goals.”

Michael Damian Thomas said,

Lynne and I dreamt up and founded Uncanny Magazine together 11 ...Read More

Welcome to the March edition of the SFWA Market Report.

Please note: Inclusion of any venue in this report does not indicate an official endorsement by SFWA. Those markets included on this list pay at least $0.08/word USD in at least one category of fiction. This compilation is not exhaustive of all publication opportunities that pay our recommended minimum professional rate. Additionally, SFWA adheres to our DEI Policy when making selections for this report. We strongly encourage writers to closely review all contracts and consult our resources on best contract practices.

Markets Currently Open for Submissions

Analog Science Fiction & Fact
Asimov Press
Asimov’s Science Fiction
Banshee (Magazine) (Recently Opened)
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
Cast of Wonders (Recently Opened)
Clarkesworld Magazine
Crepuscular Magazine
Escape Pod
Factor Four Magazine
Flame Tree Fiction Newsletter
Haven Spec Magazine (Recently Opened)
Infinite Worlds
Issues in Earth Science
It Was Paradise
khoréo magazine (khoreo) (Recently Opened)
Metastellar (Originals) (Recently Opened)
Nature: Futures
Orion’s Belt (Recently Opened)
Planet Scumm
Plott Hound Magazine (Recently Opened)
PodCastle
Reckoning
Samovar
Small Wonders
Torch Literary Arts
Uncharted Magazine
Utopia Science Fiction
Wrath Month

Markets Recently Closed for Submissions

Abyss & Apex
Book XI
Flash Fiction Online (FFO) (Originals)
Frivolous Comma
Impressions Anthology Series (Permanent)
The Cosmic Background
The Tributary
Worlds of Possibility (Permanent)

Other Opportunities

Al Blanchard Award
Apex Monthly Flash Fiction Contest
The Tomorrow Prize

Upcoming Market Changes

Apex Monthly Flash Fiction Contest‘s Submission Window ends soon.
Apex Monthly Flash Fiction Contest‘s Submission Window begins soon.
Banshee (Magazine)‘s “Speculative Fiction, or It doesn’t have to be this way” theme ends soon.
Cast of Wonders‘s “Seasonal Stories” theme ends soon.
Cast of Wonders‘s “Banned Books Week” theme begins soon.
Flash Fiction Online (FFO) (Originals)‘s Submission window begins soon.
Haven Spec Magazine‘s Limited demographic submission window: authors of color, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and other underrepresented groups ends soon.
Haven Spec Magazine‘s Submission window begins soon.
khoréo magazine (khoreo)‘s Submission Window ends soon.
Metastellar (Originals)‘s Submission window ends soon.
Mmeory‘s Submission window begins soon.
Plott Hound Magazine‘s Submission window ends soon.
PodCastle‘s “Disability Pride and Magic” Theme ends soon.
PodCastle‘s General Submission Window ends soon.
Solarpunk Magazine‘s Submission window begins soon.
The Deadlands‘s Submission Window begins soon.
The Orange & Bee‘s Submission Window begins soon.
Uncanny‘s Flash fiction submission window begins and ends soon.
Utopia Science Fiction‘s “Disability Pride” Theme ends soon.
Women of the Weird West‘s Submission window begins soon.

The SFWA Market Report is compiled by David Steffen, editor of Diabolical Plots and The Long List Anthology series, and administrator and co-founder of the Submission Grinder.  You can support Diabolical Plots and the Submission Grinder on PayPal or Patreon or by buying books or merch.

The post SFWA Market Report For March appeared first on SFWA.

Finalists for the 2025 Imadjinn Awards have been announced. Categories of genre interest follow.

Best Science Fiction Novel

• Path to Freedom, James Copley (Cannon)
• Salvage Purgatory, Jason Cordova, Kevin Steverson & Nick Steverson (Theogony)
• Prince Conqueror, Fred Hughes (Chris Kennedy)
• 2028: Tomorrow Is the Day, L.R. O’Brien (Austin Macauley)

Best Fantasy Novel

• Cursed by a Siren’s Kiss, LS Embers & Riley Hunt (self-published)
• Chosen By

...Read More

The shortlists for the 2025 Carnegie Medal for Writing and Carnegie Medal for Illustration, honoring UK books for children and young adults, have been announced. Titles and authors of genre interest follow.

Carnegie Medal for Writing

• Treacle Town, Brian Conaghan (Andersen)
• The Things We Leave Behind, Clare Furniss (Simon & Schuster UK)
• All That It Ever Meant, Blessing Musariri (Zephyr Head of Zeus)

Carnegie Medal for Illustration

...Read More

MILESTONES

MEGAN CHEE is now repre­sented by Stevie Finegan of Zeno Agency Ltd.

AWARDS

EVE HILL-AGNUS won the 2024 Albertine Translation Prize for her translation of Ultramarine by MARIETTE NAVARRO (Deep Vellum), presented by the French Embassy in the US and selected by a jury.

 

BOOKS SOLD

 

STEPHEN KING will write Han­sel and Gretel, a “reimagining” of the fairy tale, with illustrations by the late MAURICE SENDAK ...Read More

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) has released the finalists for the 2024 Nebula Awards via YouTube video.

Novel

• Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory, Yaroslav Barsukov (Caezik SF & Fantasy) amazon / bookshop
• Rakesfall, Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom) amazon / bookshop
• Asunder, Kerstin Hall (Tordotcom) amazon / bookshop
• A Sorceress Comes to Call, T. Kingfisher (Tor; Titan UK) amazon / bookshop
• The Book of Love

...Read More

Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction have been acquired by Must Read Magazines, a division of a new publishing company, Must Read Books Publishing. All editorial staff from the magazines have been retained in the acquisitions. Jackie Sherbow has been promoted to editor of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. P.L. Stevens joins the ...Read More

Bloomsbury has announced a new SF/F imprint, Bloomsbury Archer, and plans for it to publish “across the constellation of speculative fiction – from fantasy and science fiction to crossover, speculative romance, and from horror to myth retellings.” The imprint’s name comes from the current Bloomsbury emblem of the Roman hunter goddess Diana, “referencing the imprint’s pursuit of the very best storytelling and new stars.”

Vicky Leech Mateos and Noa Wheeler ...Read More