Industry News

BizarroCon has announced the winners for the 2024 Wonderland Book Awards for Excellence in Bizarro Fiction.

Best Novel

• WINNER: Edenville, Sam Rebelein (William Morrow)

• The Last Night to Kill Nazis, David Agranoff (CLASH)
• Elogona, Samantha Kolesnik (WeirdPunk )
• Glass Children, Carlton Mellick III (Eraserhead)
• Soft Targets, Carson Winter (Tenebrous)

Best Collection

• WINNER: All I Want is to Take Shrooms and Listen to the Color of

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The 2024 Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund (TAFF), which “will send a European fan to the 2025 Worldcon in Seattle,” is open for nominations until December 20, 2024.

TAFF “was created in 1953 for the purpose of providing funds to bring well-known and popular [science fiction] fans familiar to those on both sides of the ocean across the Atlantic. Since that time TAFF has regularly brought North American fans to European conventions ...Read More

Clarion West has announced that their next six-week workshop will be held virtually instead of in-person, and will run June 22-August 2, 2025. The new format is “designed to give students more time to write, additional lecture time with instructors, and more experimentation with workshopping models.” The instructors will be Maurice Broaddus, Malka Older, Diana Pho, and Martha Wells. Applications open on December 1, 2024 and close February 15, 2025. ...Read More

Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape; Grove Atlantic US) is the winner of the 2024 Man Booker Prize. It depicts the lives of astronauts, and is “the first Booker Prize-winning book set in space.”

This year’s shortlist also included James by Percival Everett (Mantle;Doubleday US).

The £50,000 prize is “open to works by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK or Ireland.” This year’s judges

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ActuSF has announced the winners for the 2024 Prix de l’Uchronie. The prize is awarded to works of alternate history, written or translated into French and published between September 1, 2022 and June 30, 2023.

Prix Littéraire

• WINNER: Noblesse oblige, Maiwenn Alix (Slalom)

• L’Affaire Crystal Singer [Singer Distance], Ethan Chatagnier, translated by Michelle Charrier (Albin Michel Imaginaire)
• Le Huitième Registre 1. Le Silène assassiné, Alain Bergeron (Alire)
• Protectorats, Ray

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Winners for the 2024 Premio Italia Awards have been announced, honoring accomplishments in the field of Italian fantasy and science fiction.

International Novel

• WINNER: Le navi d’ossa [The Bone Ships], R.J. Barker (Meridiano Zero – Elara)

• L’archivio dei finali alternativi [The Archive of Alternate Endings], Lindsey Drager (Zona42)
• The Kaiju Preservation Society, John Scalzi (Fanucci Editore)
• Fattore Rh, Charles Stross (Mondadori)
• Project Hail

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by Carrie Finch

Editor’s note: This piece is part of an occasional series titled Writing by Other Means, in which authors share personal experiences and industry intel around different production contexts and writing tools.

Painters have brush and canvas. Dancers have mirrors and marley floors. Musicians have their instruments and the loving maintenance they require. Artists and craftspeople have beautiful tools with storied pasts that ground them in their history. There’s an easy access to the romance of the craft, a tantalizing indulgence that can feed the love and lift the passion when the grind of the work makes energy wane.

Writers type. A lot. It’s tough to be a writer in this era and not spend the bulk of our time typing. In the recent SFWA Blog article (Temporarily) Computer-Free Writing, N. R. M. Roshak wrote about alternative methods of getting our words onto the page, mentioning first the historic standard of pen on paper. Personally, I’ve found a lot of joy in writing by hand, especially using fountain pens. There’s a quiet pleasure in putting pen to paper, a sort of reaching back through time, thinking of the writers who–with similar tools–were able to create my favorite stories.

Why Use Fountain Pens

As writers, we’re cautioned against being too attached to any part of how we do our work. At every turn, we’re told “kill your darlings,” not just in prose but in process as well. And there is wisdom in this. There is a fine line between being particular and being precious. Don’t get too attached to your seat at the library, lest you find someone else sitting in it. Don’t get too attached to your corner café, lest it close, and suddenly you’re incapable of working at the pace you once could. Flexibility allows us to get our work done, even when the conditions aren’t right.

But there is something to be said for indulgence. There is something to be said for a routine that allows your mind to turn away from worries about the real world, the house that needs cleaning, the family that needs caring for, the boss that emails after hours, and turn toward the work of writing. Making that cup of tea. Turning on that specific playlist (or sometimes, that single song on repeat for hours). Adjusting the lamp to have the light just so.

Fountain pens can be part of that indulgence. The weight of the pen in your hand, the drag of it across a sheet of paper, can be such a satisfying tactile experience. Depending on your preferences, some pens will make noise as they scratch along the page. Others glide smoothly and silently. It can be such a delight to discover your preferred set of tools and to have that delight carry into your next writing session when you bring them out.

There are also practical reasons to use fountain pens. Earlier this year, R.J. Huneke wrote in his article Writing SFF With Paper and Pen Spurs Memory and Creativity about the benefits of using pen and paper, the way it can change our cognitive processes, allowing us to be creative in ways that typing might not. If you were inspired to try writing by hand, I highly recommend fountain pens. Unlike most pens, they require absolutely no pressure to deposit ink onto the paper, other than the weight of the pen itself. You no longer have to grip the pen or press down on the page, which can prevent fatigue and even injury.

Recently, I went to the San Francisco International Pen Show, three days dedicated to the world of fountain pens. And if there’s one thing I’ve seen to be consistent among fountain pen fans, it’s how excited we are to talk to anyone about pens. Show us the slightest bit of curiosity, and we’ll happily talk your ear off, offering our opinions on the ideal starter pen on the way.

Where to Start

And what is the ideal starter pen? The popular recommendations are the Lamy Safari and the Pilot Metropolitan, and whichever you pick I recommend starting with a fine nib. They come with ink cartridges, so all you have to do is click one into place and wait for the ink to start flowing. But if you want to use bottled ink, most pens will also come with a converter, a device that draws up ink into the pen. There’s a slight learning curve with a fountain pen, as the angle with which you hold the pen does matter. Prepare to play around with this a little bit until you find what’s comfortable for you.

Perhaps you’re asking: What about left-handed writers? The richly flowing ink can take a moment to dry, and most lefties will say this is just long enough for it to smear across the page and stain the side of their hand. But there are solutions available. Faster-drying inks, more absorptive paper, and finer nibs can all help avoid some common issues encountered by those who write left-handed.

There’s a wide world of pens, each settling in the hand differently. There’s also a wide world of nib styles. Not just the flexion in the metal, but also the grind of the nib, which can be fine-tuned for your hand by a professional. There are a multitude of inks available, and each one will feel slightly different as you write with it. 

And don’t forget the paper, each with a different texture, thickness, and rate of absorption, each giving a different writing experience. You don’t have to start anywhere special; your run-of-the-mill spiral notebook is just fine. But once you decide to explore further, there are plenty of videos and blog posts demonstrating how various papers soak up ink and whether they bleed or ghost (differing ways in which the ink is visible on the other side of the page). There are also paper sample packs available, so you can work with several papers before you commit to one. Some people prefer a smooth glide, others enjoy coarse feedback. Some people are fine with a bit of ghosting, others are repulsed by the thought. Just like with pens, you get to discover your own personal fit here.

I hope this inspires you to consider starting your own fountain pen journey or perhaps reignites an old hobby. Whatever you’re looking for in your handwriting experience, there’s a combination of tools that will feel just right for you. And like all things in life, the journey is part of the experience. Happy writing!

Carrie Finch is a writer in San Francisco, California. Her published fiction includes fantasy, science fiction, and horror. She goes by “geardrops” on every social media imaginable and would love to talk to you about fountain pens. carriefinch.com

The post Only as Good as Our Tools: Drafting by Hand and Fountain Pens appeared first on SFWA.

Paul Ryan O’Connor is the winner of the Speculative Literature Foundation’s (SLF) 2024 Older Writers Grant, which gives $1,000 to writers “fifty years of age or older at the time of grant application, and is intended to assist such writers who are just starting to work at a professional level.”

O’Connor was awarded the grant for his unpublished novel Gumshoe Frankenstein.

Applications for the Older Writers Grant are considered ...Read More

The Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (LASFS) has selected Hayao Miyazaki as this year’s recipient of the Forry Award for lifetime achievement in the SF field. Miyazaki is the founder of Studio Ghibli and has won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature for Spirited Award (2001) and The Boy and the Heron (2023), and has received nominations for Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) and The Wind Rises (2013).

The award, ...Read More

The Asociación Española de Fantasía, Ciencia Ficción y Terror (AEFCFT) has announced the winners for the 2024 Ignotus Awards, honoring speculative fiction from Spain and beyond.

Novela extranjera (Foreign Novel)

• WINNER: Mi corazón es una motosierra [My Heart Is a Chainsaw], Stephen Graham Jones, translated by Manuel de los Reyes (Biblioteca de Carfax)

• Ascensión [Ascension], Nicholas Binge, translated by Gemma Benavent (Minotauro)
• Hermana Roja [Red Sister], Mark Lawrence, translated by

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In an October victory for freedom-to-read activists, the Matanuska-Susinta Borough School District in Alaska has agreed to pay $89,000 for indiscriminately removing 56 books from library shelves. In November of 2023, the American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska, the Northern Justice Project, and eight local plaintiffs filed a suit against the district for the removal of these books from school libraries without due process. However, the district maintains that each ...Read More

An annotated version of Terry Pratchett’s 29th Discworld novel, Night Watch, will be released in Spring of 2025. The title will be released under Penguin Random House as a Penguin Modern Classic, recognizing Pratchett’s immense influence in the literary world as a genre author.

The edition will have a foreword by Rob Wilkins, managing director of Pratchett’s literary estate, and annotations by Dr David Lloyd and Dr Darryl Jones ...Read More

The shortlist for the inaugural PEN Heaney prize in poetry has been announced. The list included two works with speculative elements:

• Hyena! by Fran Lock (Poetry Bus Press)
• A Tower Built Downwards by Yang Lian, trans. Brian Holton (Bloodaxe Books)

A collaboration between English PEN, PEN Ireland/PEN na hÉireann, and the Estate of Seamus Heaney, the award honors a single book of poetry published in the United Kingdom or Ireland ...Read More

The Ignyte Awards Committee has announced the winners of the 2024 Ignyte Awards, which “seek to celebrate the vibrancy and diversity of the current and future landscapes of science fiction, fantasy, and horror by recognizing incredible feats in storytelling and outstanding efforts toward inclusivity of the genre.”

Outstanding Novel: Adult

WINNER: The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom)

• To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, Moniquill Blackgoose (Del Rey)

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Ledia Xhoga, Keith R.A. DeCandido, Katherine Silva, Catherynne M. Valente read at the Barrow’s Intense Tasting Room in Industry City, Brooklyn NY on October 15, 2024 as part of the Brooklyn Books & Booze Reading series, hosted by Randee Dawn.

While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and ...Read More

Now available to download

Vector 295 Greek SFF

Vector 295, Greek SFF, is guest edited by Phoenix Alexander. Arriving April 2022. Featuring interviews with Nick Mamatas, Yanis Varoufakis, Polis Loizou, Mikhail Karikis and Alexis Panayiotou and contributions by Christos Callow Jr,  Dimitra Nikolaidou, Paul Kincaid, Vasso Christou and others.

Cover by Mikhail Karikis.

In September 2024, Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin launched a free new weekly newsletter called Shelfies. Each week they feature a photo of a bookshelf from an author, artist, collector, or book lover, along with a brief essay “discussing some of their most treasured or interesting books.” Contributors so far include Jeffrey Alan Love, Cheryl S. Ntumy, George E. Osborn, Kieron Smith, and Kaaron Warren. For more, or to sign ...Read More

by Samuel Poots

Editor’s note: This piece is part of a rolling series, Writing from History, in which creators share professional insights related to the work of using historical elements in fictional prose.

In 2009, I met my hero. I was eighteen, painted blue, and wearing a borrowed kilt, a brave choice for November in Ireland. At the other end of a line of eager fans sat a man with a white beard and black hat. Terry Pratchett’s work had gotten me through plenty of hard times, and I had already decided to become a writer, like he was. So, when my time came to hand over Folklore of the Discworld for signing, I asked The Question. The question all budding writers ask their literary idols.

Got any tips?

You can watch the moment here; some kind soul uploaded it so the world can see me standing half-naked before my favorite author. I came away in a star-struck daze, but two pieces of advice stuck with me:

1. Read history like crazy.
2. Avoid other new writers; they don’t know enough to help you yet.

The second point did not work for me, but the first I took to heart. Soon, I was stumbling into historical moments in almost every fantasy work I read. In Pratchett’s Night Watch alone, we encounter the Peterloo Massacre, the June Rebellion, and the Battle of Cable Street (that last one’s in name only)—all recontextualised to fit Ankh-Morpork’s grimy streets.

When writing fantasy, authors often look to history. Sometimes, it even provides a script to follow. For example, R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War follows 21st-century Chinese history through its fantasy world. Such practices often lead critics to dismiss fantasy as “backwards-looking.” And this is true. We love diving into imagined pasts, histories that never were, timelines that dance back and forth across reality’s rails. It is also true this has trended toward the conservative. “Righteous” monarchies, good wars, nostalgia-infused depictions of a homogenous European history are considered genre hallmarks. However, far from making fantasy inherently conservative, this drawing from history can be the genre’s greatest radical strength.

In 1998, Dianna Wynne Jones’s Dark Lord of Derkholm flipped Eurocentric fantasy on its head. Suddenly, all those familiar tropes became subject to colonialism, their resources and culture subsumed to the desires of tourist parties made up of wealthy fantasy fans. Jones took colonial history’s script and applied it to the fantasy worlds it had itself helped spawn, showing her Western audience their place within it.

In An Introduction to Fantasy, Matthew Sangster describes fantasy as being self-consciously iterative, building upon the histories and folk traditions it grew from. The genre is “obsessed” with the past, re-imagining it to find new outcomes. Doing so often reveals gaps in the histories, places where people—queer people, women, people faced with colonization and racial oppression—had their stories overlooked and suppressed. Stories like The Traitor Baru Cormorant, The Unbroken, and Fireheart Tiger hold a post-colonial, queer lens to the history of empire. By focusing on these overlooked histories, writers tap into the true revolutionary potential of fantasy’s obsession with the past.

Yet fantasy is not alone in this obsession. According to historians Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein, those who dismiss fantasy as conservative may be surprised to find referencing the past is a hallmark of another project: revolution.

Revolutions are extremely self-conscious of how previous revolutions unfolded. These revolutionary scripts offer frameworks for political action. Whether they serve as models or counterexamples, they provide the outlines on which revolutionary actors can improvise. And revolutionaries, in turn, can transform the scripts they inherit. (Baker and Edelstein, Scripting Revolutions, Stanford University Press, 2015, p. 2)

In much the same way a fantasy author may look to the past to imagine new outcomes, revolutionaries define themselves in response to previous revolutions. This in turn fits with fantasy’s love of building layered histories and folk traditions for its characters to navigate, so it’s unsurprising to find many modern fantasy stories centering on revolution.

There can be a sense of wish fulfillment here, a wistful “If only…” we may feel when looking back at history. Revolutions take that sentiment and use it to evoke action, whereas fantasy takes history’s script and uses it to analyze the present it led us to. We are seeing fantasy’s revolutionary potential in more than just imaginary spaces.

2020 was a difficult year. The pandemic was in full swing, leaving us to gaze out through the portholes of our screens. What we saw was terrifying. Fear. Panic. Military uprisings. Anti-vaccine extremists. And, in the midst of it all, George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis police. As protests met with police brutality, quotes started appearing across social media. Quotes from Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch. Pratchett biographer Mark Burrows noted, “It was hard to watch the riots and protests…and not think of this book.” (The Novels of Sir Terry Pratchett, 2020). As people watched injustices unfold, some turned to Pratchett’s words to voice their outrage, using fantasy to explain reality.

Pratchett is far from the only author whose work is used in such a way. Earlier that same year, Thai protesters used The Hunger Games’s three-fingered salute, which Thailand had banned in 2014. The salute appeared again in Myanmar, as protestors marched against the 2021 military coup d’etat. Even Tolkien, perhaps the greatest example of apparently conservative fantasy, inspired the 1970s counter-culture slogan “Frodo Lives.”

Fantasy, revolutionary activity, and history form three spokes in a wheel. More fantasy writers are focusing their stories on revolution. More people turn to the fantastic to express their experiences with social upheaval. Reality and narrative intertwine, each one shaping the other.

I believe this is something writers are really starting to grapple with. Revolution stories are now rarely about one plucky farm boy and his sidekicks taking down the dark lord. Premee Mohamed’s Siege of Burning Grass dives into the struggle between the individual and the movement; Fonda Lee’s Green Bone Saga explores the generational impact of a post-revolution society; China Miéville’s Iron Council shouts its class struggles to the rooftops. Fantasy’s mirror is set firmly before real-world revolution. As each reflects upon the other, we find in that glass new ways to understand ourselves and the histories we shape.

Samuel Poots is a Creative Writing PhD researcher who communicates primarily through Pratchett quotes, and writer-in-residence at Ulster University. A writer of both fiction and tabletop games, his work has appeared in Dark Matter Magazine, Cast of Wonders, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and Jim Henson’s Labyrinth: The Adventure Game, among others. When not writing or procrastinating, he can usually be seen wandering the Antrim coast muttering about dragons. If found, please give him a cup of tea and send him home via the nearest post office. Follow Sam across social media as @pootsidoodle.

The post The Revolution Will Be Fantasized appeared first on SFWA.

Les Sentiers de recouvrance by Émilie Querbalec (Albin Michel Imaginaire) won the 2024 Prix Julia Verlanger.

The award is presented by the Foundation de France, and is awarded to “a science fiction work of adventure, fantasy or fantastique.” The award was created by Jean-Pierre Verlanger in memory of his wife, who wrote under the pseudonym Gilles Thomas.

The award was announced on November 3, 2024, during the Nantes Utopiales Festival. ...Read More

The six-title shortlist for the 2024 Booker Prize has been announced, with works of genre interest including James by Percival Everett (Mantle) and Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape)

The £50,000 prize is “open to works by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK or Ireland.” This year’s judges are Sara Collins, Justine Jordan, Yiyun Li, Nitin Sawhney, and chair Edmund de Waal.

Shortlisted authors

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