Industry News Home

The Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association has announced the winners of its annual prize for poetry. Poems were judged in three categories, listed below.

Dwarf Category (10 or fewer lines):

• WINNER: “Whirlpool” by Colleen Anderson
• Second Place: “She Reveals Herself” by Tabor Skreslet
• Third Place: “Perpetual Care” by Christopher Ripley Newell
• Honorable Mentions: “Desert Skies Motor Hotel” by Mark C Childs, “Haiku 6” by Tom Rogers, “dragon child” by

...Read More

Strange Horizons has announced the launch of a year-long podcast series, SH@25, in celebration of their 25th anniversary.

SH@25 will feature “interviews with authors, artists, poets, and former staff of Strange Horizons, charting the magazine’s 25 year trajectory from being founded in September 2000 to winning a Hugo in August 2024, as well as looking ahead at its future.” The project will be led by podcast editor Kat Kourbeti and ...Read More

The British Fantasy Society (BFS) has announced the winners of the 2024 British Fantasy Awards.

Best Fantasy Novel (the Robert Holdstock Award)

• WINNER: Talonsister, Jen Williams (Titan)

• At Eternity’s Gates, David Green (Eerie River)
• Beyond Sundered Seas, David Green (Eerie River)
• A Day of Fallen Night, Samantha Shannon (Bloomsbury)
• Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, Wole Talabi (DAW)

Best Horror Novel (the August Derleth

...Read More

Longtime Barnes & Noble head LEONARD RIGGIO, 83, died August 27, 2024 in Manhattan. He had Alzheimer’s.

Leonard Stephen Riggio was born February 28, 1941 in New York, and attended Brooklyn Technical High School. After graduating in 1958, he took night classes at NYU for a while before dropping out. He founded a small book­shop, the Student Book Exchange, in 1965. In 1971, he purchased New York bookshop Barnes ...Read More

Writer and publishing professional Zoe Kaplan, 28, died October 9, 2024 of complications from diabetes.

Kaplan began publishing short fiction of genre interest with “Pink Marble” in 2021, and published several other stories in magazines and anthologies. She also worked in publishing, spending time at Tor before joining Simon & Schuster in 2021, first as a member of the production team, and later as a managing editorial associate, working extensively ...Read More

Results of the 25th Fantastiknovelltävlingen, a Swedish “Fantastic Short Story Competition” organized by writers’ email list SKRIVA, have been announced.

First Place

• “Ormens väg” (“The Way of the Serpent”) by Ellinor Romin

Second Place

• “Tunnelskeende” (“Tunnel Event”) by Lizette Lindskog

Third Place

• “Väktaren på Tunnbindargatan” (“The Guardian of Cooper Street”) by Erika Johansson

Honorable Mentions

• Mattias Kuldkepp
• Camilla Olsson
• Jolina Petrén
• Tobias Robinson

Winners were awarded prizes including cash, shares

...Read More

Glasgow 2024, the 82nd World Science Fiction Convention, received 3,436 valid ballots (3,431 electronic, five paper), up from 1,674 at Chengdu Worldcon. There were an additional 377 ballots disqualified as fraudu­lent or ‘‘not cast by natural persons.’’ There were 1,720 nominating ballots (1,715 electronic, five paper), down from 1,847.

The procedure for counting nominations re­mains the E Pluribus Hugo, or EPH, system. The rather complicated system gives a single point ...Read More

South Korean author Han Kang has won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” Her novel The Vegetarian was the first Korean language book to win the International Booker Award. The 2024 prize amount is 11 million Swedish kronor, just over $1 million US.

For more information, see the Nobel Prize website.

While you are ...Read More

Scientific American published a list of “Science-Fiction Books Scientific American’s Staff Love.”

“Top Shelf Recommendations” include The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, Contact by Carl Sagan, The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin, and series The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells.

There are a number of other categories featuring works of genre interest, including “Ghastly Thrillers” and “All’s Fair In Love, War And Time Travel.”

For the complete

...Read More

The United Nations bookshop, located in the Visitors Concourse of the United Nations in the General Assembly Building, held a one-hour “meet the author” event featuring Kim Stanley Robinson on September 21, 2024.

Robinson read from The Ministry for the Future and the following Q&A was moderated by Nanette Braun, director of Public Information at the Department of Global Communications.

The bookshop offers “the latest books published by and about ...Read More

The 2024 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards have been announced. The Science Fiction & Fantasy category winner was a three-way tie: Guardians of the High Pass by Avery Christy (Well Read Coyote), Magical Mushrooms by Kris Neri (Well Read Coyote), and Oceana by E J Randolph (Well Read Coyote).

The award mission is “uncovering and honoring the best in Arizona and New Mexico books.” Each book is judged by members of ...Read More

Matthew Reardon, AKA JRH Lawless, has withdrawn his candidacy for secretary of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) special election. While there are now no official candidates, Steven D. Brewer is a write-in candidate for the position.

SFWA is holding the special election for president and secretary following the resignations of president Jeffe Kennedy and vice-president Chelsea Mueller, among others. Secretary Anthony W. Eichenlaub is currently interim president. ...Read More

The 2024 Australasian Shadows Awards (previously known as the Australia Shadows Awards) winners were presented at Conflux in Canberra on October 7, 2024.

The award is given by the Australasian Horror Writers Association (AHWA) for “the finest in horror and dark fiction published by an Australasian within the calendar year.”

Novel

• WINNER: When Ghosts Call Us Home, Katya de Becerra (Page Street; Pan Macmillan)

• Polyphemus, Zachary Ashford (Darklit)

...Read More

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

Best Novel

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

Best Collection

• All I Want is to Take Shrooms and Listen to the Color of Nazi Screams

...Read More

by Eugen Bacon

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.

You have a novel, a novella, a short story in your head—you just need to write it. The muse is humming, no shortfall of ideas. But you need that time, an hour or three, to sit at your workstation, perhaps with noise-cancelling headphones, to zone out the world, get on with it.

But your day job is a beast—roaring its demands. The boss is a monster, or maybe you’re the boss on a snarl. The minute you’re home, domesticity rushes at you in the face of a pug or a Weimaraner spoiling for a run in the park, a coon cat or a Persian arching its back and rubbing at your shins, almond-shaped eyes glowing, MEOW—where’s the trout? Perhaps it’s a kiddie—even grown, they act like they’re four, keening for your attention: Mom, Da, are you listening? Perhaps it’s your mate—angling to unload about one helluva day. All contending with your laundry, the vacuum cleaner, the stove, the dishwasher…

There goes your workstation, no getting on with it. The heck do you get time to write?

Enter sudden writing.

It works in chunking. Spurting in bite size.

Think of a novel. Think of how many mini-scenes you can extract from it. Right from the onset of writing. Your mini-scene could be in crafting the synopsis, way before you write. Or in shaping out a chapter-by-chapter breakdown. Now you’re writing: There’s the opening hook…Maybe there’s the inciting incident that kindles your hero/ine from their ordinary world to adventure…

• the obstacles—real or imagined to their quest
• their interaction(s) with a mentor—a friendly stranger, someone who inspires them to take up a gauntlet
• their encounters with allies, enemies, conflict, conflict

…all the way to a closing. Doesn’t matter your approach—it doesn’t have to be the hero/ine’s journey. Each tiny episode, be it a character journey, interaction, or event, is a mini-scene. You could break down your novel into thousands of mini-scenes, each with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Think of a short story—the scores of inherent mini-scenes. Moments in time. It could be an argument between characters. Or a love scene. Or your protagonist moving from A to B. Less than half a page of intensity and immersion, ten to fifteen minutes of a solo scene in your head, in a scribble, in your phone. Focus on that one moment, as you wait for the traffic lights to change, for your turn in a queue, as you warm a cuppa in the microwave. As you run Milo in the park (most likely it’s Milo running you)…As you crack open a can of wet food for Mittens…As you soak (finally) in the soapiest suds.

Getting started

Write on the go: jot down points that are little triggers for the scene you’re going to write. Draw the scene in your head, on a pad, in your phone. With simple word or phrase prompts, craft the bones of a sharp and meaningful conversation. Hone that fight scene, the sequence of it: who pulls what arm, which way does the blade swing? Dance your protagonist in your head, so vivid. Yelp, punch. Spin, snatch, run. One moment. Focus on “sudden”—one mini-scene, a piece of your story. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just chart the essentials.

Here’s a moment in time that I scratched in a minute, prose-poetic scribbles on the go:

Who was a trick question

He saw a woman with eyes whose beauty

radiant as a summer meadow

he thought of

~sweet peas

~roses

~dahlias

~lilies

Was she punishment or consolation

Was he a wolf or a dog?

It was the essence of a scene:

He found a woman named Dash who was a trick question. Her beauty was a radiant summer meadow, and he thought of the pink, salmon and white of dew-kissed sweet peas, the sunniest yellow of baby-fresh dahlias, the rarity of blue and peach roses that weren’t the popular kind because they self-picked where they grew, and the purpliest lilies that belonged in a wedding, and buzzed pureness and a hint of coquetry. Was she punishment or consolation? And was he a wolf or a puppy?

And here’s dialogue, journaled on the go:

You have uncertainty about everything

Even me

Especially us

It was convenient for you to stay away. You didn’t have to make a decision.

About you?

About us.

Is this just physical?

Unfair. Sure, sex is a sweetness, nectar, connection, feelings.

Guavas.

A minute of sudden fiction shaped out a mini-moment between vulnerable lovers navigating their feelings, fleshing out my novel on the go (character names have changed):

Zed is still as if she has died. Then her words slip out quietly.

“Must you do that? Bring uncertainty to everything?”

“Even you?” asks Bree, doubtful she’s heard right.

“Especially me. It was a convenience for you to stay away. That way, you didn’t have to decide. Anything.”

“About you?”

“About us. Bree, is this just physical for you?”

“It’s unfair of you to ask that. Sure, our sex is a sweetness, nectar from the gods. But, of course, there’s connection and feelings.”

Zed listens with such hunger, clinging to every word as if she were a fish, and it water.

“Feelings? Such as?”

“I mean. I like you a lot,” says Bree. “I really, really like you.”

“And I like guavas. I really, really like them.”

When it’s hard to write full-time without life’s distractions, why wait for a long stretch of crafting at a workstation that might never happen?

Stay prolific

Chunk your project into doable “minis.” Draw on the flexibility and experimentation of sudden fiction, spurts of prose poetry to write on the go.

This approach mostly works when ideas are flowing—what you’re lacking is time. As you draft your creative text through journaling, notes, and scrawl mini-episodes physically or in your mind, each vignette shapes the sum of a whole. You might be astonished to discover how powerful these bursts of creative minis can be.

Later, when you’ve got time, you have all the minis to develop into robust scenes.

Eugen Bacon is an African Australian author. She’s a British Fantasy and Foreword Indies Award winner, a twice World Fantasy Award finalist, and a finalist in other awards, including the Shirley Jackson, Philip K. Dick Award, as well as the Nommo Awards for speculative fiction by Africans. Eugen was announced in the honor list of the Otherwise Fellowships for “doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction.” Danged Black Thing made the Otherwise Award Honor List as a “sharp collection of Afro-Surrealist work.” Visit her at eugenbacon.com.

The post Sudden: Writing on the Go appeared first on SFWA.

The winners for the 2024 Ditmar Awards for Australian SF have been announced.

Best Novel

• WINNER: The Sinister Booksellers of Bath, Garth Nix (Allen & Unwin)

• Polyphemus, Zachary Ashford (DarkLit)
• The Tangled Lands, Glenda Larke (Wizard’s Tower)
• Dream Weaver, Steven Paulsen (IFWG)
• When Dark Roots Hunt, Zena Shapter (MidnightSun)
• Traitor’s Run, Keith Stevenson (coeur de lion)

Best Novella or Novelette

• WINNER: “Bitters”, Kaaron Warren

...Read More

Sarah Guan announced via social media that she has left her position as publisher of Erewhon Books. Guan said:

Over my five years at Erewhon, we championed a diverse list of award winners and finalists, bestsellers, and Indie Next picks who garnered rave reviews from national and international media…. While I will dearly miss working with our amazing authors — and will always cheer for their success — I leave ...Read More

The Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) has announced the winners of the 2024 Elgin Awards, presented for the best poetry chapbook and the best full-length poetry book in the speculative genre. The Elgin Awards are named after the founder of SFPA, Suzette Haden Elgin.

Best Full-Length Book

• First Place: The Gravity of Existence, Christina Sng (Interstellar Flight)
• Second Place: Bounded By Eternity, Deborah L. Davitt self-published)

...Read More

Welcome to the October 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

Afrofuturism Short Stories
Dust & Dark
Mmeory (Upcoming)
Our Dust Earth (Upcoming)
Planet Black Joy
Plott Hound Magazine (Upcoming)
Poisoned Soup for the Macabre, Depraved and Insane: Nostalgic Terrors (Upcoming)
Silent Nightmares Anthology: Stories to be Told on the Longest Night of the Year (Upcoming)

Markets Currently Open for Submissions

AE Presents: Unréal
Aliens Among Us (SpeKulative Stories Anthology Series)
Analog Science Fiction & Fact
Apex Magazine
Asimov’s Science Fiction
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
Book XI (Recently Opened)
Cast of Wonders (Recently Opened)
Clarkesworld Magazine
Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores (Recently Opened)
Crepuscular Magazine
Escape Pod (Recently Opened)
Factor Four Magazine
Flame Tree Fiction Newsletter
Flash Fiction Online (FFO) (Originals) (Recently Opened)
Infinite Worlds
Issues in Earth Science
Metastellar (Originals) (Recently Opened)
Nature: Futures
Never Whistle At Night Anthology Series (Recently Opened)
Reckoning
Samovar
Small Wonders
Solarpunk Magazine (Recently Opened)
Stop Copaganda
Strange Horizons (Recently Opened)
The Cosmic Background
This Way Lies Madness
Train Tales
Uncharted Magazine
Utopia Science Fiction

Markets Recently Closed for Submissions

100-Foot Crow
Achilles (Permanent)
Cursed Morsels Zine
DreamForge Anvil
Gamut Magazine
Morgana le Fay (Permanent)
Orion’s Belt
The Deadlands
The Green Sheaf

Upcoming Market Changes

Afrofuturism Short Stories permanently closes soon.
Apex Monthly Flash Fiction Contest‘s Submission Window begins and ends soon.
Cast of Wonders‘s Submission Window ends soon.
Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores‘s Submission Window ends soon.
Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores‘s Submission Window begins and ends soon.
Dust & Dark‘s Submission Window ends soon.
Flash Fiction Online (FFO) (Originals)‘s Submission Window ends soon.
Metastellar (Originals)‘s Submission window ends soon.
Our Dust Earth‘s Submission window begins soon.
PodCastle‘s Submission Window begins soon.
Solarpunk Magazine‘s Submission window ends soon.
The Deadlands‘s Submission Window begins soon.
The Orange & Bee‘s Submission window begins soon.
This Way Lies Madness permanently closes soon.
Utopia Science Fiction‘s “Epic Poetry and Flash Fiction” Theme ends soon.
Utopia Science Fiction‘s “Xeno-Linguistics” Theme 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.  The acceptances from the July Diabolical Plots submission window have been announced! 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 October appeared first on SFWA.

Canadian fan and author FRAN SKENE, 86, died June 17, 2024. Skene was active in Van­couver fandom in the ’70s and ’80s, chairing Westercon 30 in 1977, among other conven­tions, and was a major part of the ‘‘Vancouver in ’84’’ Worldcon bid. She also produced fanzines, and was a guest of honor at numerous conventions. Born December 18, 1937, Skene worked as a librarian. After her retirement, she published ...Read More