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O’Connor was awarded the grant for his unpublished novel Gumshoe Frankenstein.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

...Read More

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)

...Read More

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

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

...Read More

Welcome to the November 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.

New Markets

Aphrodite
Fever Dreams
Latin American Shared Stories
Loki
Out There
Shatter the Sun: Queer Tales of Untold Adventure
The Daily Tomorrow

Markets Currently Open for Submissions

AE Presents: Unréal
Analog Science Fiction & Fact
Apex Magazine
Asimov’s Science Fiction
Augur (Recently Opened)
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
Book XI
Clarkesworld Magazine
Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores (Recently Opened)
Crepuscular Magazine
Escape Pod
Factor Four Magazine
Flame Tree Fiction Newsletter
Infinite Worlds
Issues in Earth Science
khoréo magazine (khoreo) (Recently Opened)
Nature: Futures
Never Whistle At Night Anthology Series
Our Dust Earth (Recently Opened)
Planet Black Joy
PodCastle (Recently Opened)
Reckoning
Samovar
Small Wonders
Stop Copaganda
Tales & Feathers (Recently Opened)
The Cosmic Background
The Deadlands (Recently Opened)
The Orange & Bee (Recently Opened)
Uncharted Magazine
Utopia Science Fiction (Recently Opened)

Markets Recently Closed for Submissions

Afrofuturism Short Stories (Permanent)
Aliens Among Us (SpeKulative Stories Anthology Series) (Permanent)
Cast of Wonders
Dust & Dark
Flash Fiction Online (FFO) (Originals)
Gamut Magazine
Metastellar (Originals)
Solarpunk Magazine
Strange Horizons
This Way Lies Madness (Permanent)
Train Tales (Permanent)

Other Opportunities

Weird Christmas Flash Fiction Contest

Upcoming Market Changes

AE Presents: Unréal‘s Submission window ends soon.
Apex Magazine‘s Submission Window ends soon.
Apex Monthly Flash Fiction Contest‘s Submission Window begins and ends soon.
Aphrodite permanently closes soon.
Augur‘s Limited Demographic Submission Window: BIPOC, trans, and/or disabled and Canadian citizens/permanent residents and/or those who are living on the land colonially known as Canada ends soon.
Baffling Magazine‘s Submission window begins soon.
Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores‘s Submission Window ends soon.
Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores‘s Submission Window begins and ends soon.
Fever Dreams permanently closes soon.
khoréo magazine (khoreo)‘s “Symbiosis” Theme ends soon.
Loki permanently closes soon.
Never Whistle At Night Anthology Series‘s Submission Window ends soon.
PodCastle‘s Submission Window ends soon.
Silent Nightmares Anthology: Stories to be Told on the Longest Night of the Year‘s Submission Window begins soon.
Stop Copaganda‘s Submission window ends soon.
Tales & Feathers‘s Limited Demographic Submission Window: BIPOC, trans, and/or disabled ends soon.
The Orange & Bee‘s Submission window ends soon.
Weird Christmas Flash Fiction Contest temporarily closes 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 November appeared first on SFWA.

Publishers Weekly has announced its list of the best books of 2024, divided into 13 categories.

The Book of Love by Kelly Link (Random House) and James by Percival Everett (Doubleday) were on the overall Top 10 list.

The best books in the SF/Fantasy/Horror category are:

• Memorials, Richard Chizmar (Gallery)
• Metal from Heaven, August Clarke (Erewhon)
• Midnight Rooms, Donyae Coles (Amistad)
• The Mercy of Gods, James

...Read More

Author Phil Rickman, 74, died October 29, 2024. Rickman was a journalist and a prolific author of crime and supernatural fiction, best known for the Merrily Watkins mystery series, adapted into a TV series in 2015.

Philip Rickman was born in Lancashire and lived in Wales. He was a reporter for Wales Today in the 1980s, and worked in radio broadcasting for over two decades, hosting literature show Phil the ...Read More

Artist Greg Hildebrandt, 85, died October 31, 2024.

He frequently collaborated with his identical twin brother Tim (1939-2006) as “The Brothers Hildebrandt,” achieving fame for their illustrations of works by J.R.R. Tolkien, frequently featured in calendars. They also illustrated a 1975 edition of Tolkien’s Smith of Wootton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham.

Gregory J. Hildebrandt was born January 23, 1939 in Detroit MI. Both Hildebrandts joined the Army ...Read More

The 13 finalists for the Barnes and Noble Book of the Year 2024 have been announced, and include historical novel The Women by Kristin Hannah (St. Martin’s), who sometimes writes fantasy; Huckleberry Finn reimagining James by Percival Everett (Knopf), who also writes SF; and fantasy novel Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell (Random House Children’s Books).

Shortlisted titles are nominated by Barnes and Noble booksellers. The winner will be announced on ...Read More

The Saltire Society announced the 2024 Scotland’s National Book Award shortlist during a livestreamed event in Edinburgh’s Old Town on October 30, 2024. Titles of genre interest follow.

Fiction Book of the Year

• Lost People, Margaret Elphinstone (Wild Stone)
• Hazardous Spirits, Anbara Salam (Baskerville)

Fiction Book First Book of the Year

• Fragile Animals, Genevieve Jagger (404 Ink)

For more information, including the full shortlists, see the Saltire Society’s

...Read More

Reactor compiled a list of “The Most Iconic Speculative Fiction Books of the 21st Century” in various categories.

Works in Translation

• Tender Is the Flesh, Agustina Bazterrica, translated by Sarah Moses (Scribner)
• I’m Waiting For You and Other Stories, Kim Bo-Young, translated by Sophie Bowman and Sung Ryu (Harper Voyager)
• Cursed Bunny: Stories, Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur (Algonquin)
• Our Share of Night, Mariana Enriquez,

...Read More

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) has announced the results of its special election.

President: Kate Ristau

Secretary:  Steven D. Brewer

The newly elected officers and directors-at-large will serve on the SFWA Board from November 1st, 2024, through June 30th, 2025.

Kate Ristau – President Anthony Eichenlaub – Vice President Jonathan Brazee – CFO Steven D. Brewer – Secretary Christine Taylor-Butler – Director-at-Large Phoebe Barton – Director-at-Large Noah ...Read More