Industry News

The shortlist for the 2026 Branford Boase Award for children's books has been announced. Titles and authors of genre interest includeGloam by Jack Mackay (Viking Books for Young Readers US; Rock the Boat UK) [amazon / bookshop] and Augmented by Kenechi Udogu (Faber & Faber Children's) [amazon / bookshop].

The Boase award is given annually to the author of an outstanding debut novel for children. The author and editor of …Read More

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Winners of the Tolkien Society Awards 2026 were announced on April 27, 2026. The awards recognize excellence in the fields of Tolkien scholarship and fandom, highlighting our long-standing charitable objective to 'seek to educate the public in, and promote research into, the life and works of' J.R.R. Tolkien. The society's trustees choose the shortlist, with winners chosen by the membership.

Best Book

• WINNER:The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R. Tolkien's …Read More

  The post The Tolkien Society Awards 2026 appeared first on Locus Online.

We are so pleased to have the talented Alyssa Winans as Featured Local Artist at the Locus Awards Weekendon May 30, 2026 in Berkeley, California! Her work is vibrant and inventive, and we can't wait to see it at the event. Winans joins a lineup of amazing local creators, as well as Guests of Honor Nnedi Okorafor, Tananarive Due, and Stephen Graham Jones, for an unforgettable celebration.

ALYSSA WINANS …Read More

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Clarion West (CW) has announced a collaborative partnership with artist-led nonprofit Common AREA Maintenance (CAM) in Seattle to advance development and long-term usage of the El Rey Building - a previously abandoned 30,000 square foot building in Seattle's Belltown neighborhood. The ADA-accessible building will be the new site of the Clarion West Six-Week Workshop and will support multiple artists and writers year-round.

CAM purchased the building for $20 in …Read More

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John H. Guidry, 81, died March 9, 2026.

John Henry Guidry was born December 15, 1944 in New Orleans LA and attended William Carey College. He created the Edgar Rice Burroughs Amateur Press Association and co-published Forgotten Tales of Love and Murder (2001). In 1988, he was the chair of Nolacon II, the 46th World Science Fiction Convention. He is survived by his sister and his nieces and nephews. …Read More

The post John H. Guidry (1944–2026) appeared first on Locus Online.

The Los Angeles Times has announced the winners of their 46th annual Book Prizes.

Winners of genre interest, and other titles and authors of genre interest in those categories, include:

Science Fiction/Fantasy

• WINNER:Luminous, Silvia Park (Simon & Schuster)

• The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones (Saga)
• The Death of Mountains, Jordan Kurella (Lethe)
• Death of the Author, Nnedi Okorafor (William Morrow)
• Esperance, Adam Oyebanji (DAW)

Fiction …Read More

The post LA Times Book Prize Winners appeared first on Locus Online.

The preliminary ballot for the 2026 Ditmar Awards for Australian SF has been announced.

Best Novel

• Veil, Jeff Clulow (Third Eye) amazon / bookshop
• Honeyeater, Kathleen Jennings (Tordotcom) amazon / bookshop
• When Dark Waters Burn, Zena Shapter (Midnight Sun) amazon
• The Crimson Road, A.G. Slatter (Titan) amazon / bookshop
• Upon a Starlit Tide, Kell Woods (HarperCollins) amazon / bookshop

Best Novella or Novelette

• Cinder House, Freya Marske …Read More

  The post 2026 Ditmar Awards Preliminary Ballot appeared first on Locus Online.

The 2026 Aurora Awards ballot for works by Canadians has been announced. The Aurora Awards are nominated by members of the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association. The top five nominated works were selected, with additional works included when there was a tie for fifth place.

Best Novel

• A Shift of Time, Julie E. Czerneda (DAW) amazon / bookshop
• Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales, Heather Fawcett (Del Rey) …Read More

  The post 2026 Aurora Awards Ballot appeared first on Locus Online.

The Libertarian Futurist Society (LFS) has announced the five finalists for the Best Novel category of the Prometheus Awards, honoring thematically pro-liberty works published in 2025.

• Storm-Dragon, Dave Freer (Raconteur) amazon / bookshop
• War By Other Means, Karl K. Gallagher (Kelt Haven) amazon
• No Man's Land Volumes 1-3, Sarah A. Hoyt (Goldport) amazon / bookshop
• A Kiss for Damocles, J. Kenton Pierce (Raconteur) amazon / bookshop
• Powerless, Harry Turtledove …Read More

  The post 2026 Prometheus Novel Award Finalists appeared first on Locus Online.

Reviewed by Kathleen Hughes

It came as no surprise to me to learn that Wole Talabi is an engineer by profession. Convergence Problems (2024), Talabi’s anthology of short stories, is filled with vivid tales of industrial failure, mechanical faults, and systemic entropy. In the future worlds depicted by Talabi – often set in Nigeria, where he is from – prosperity and investment have come and gone (‘Embers’), citizen dissidents are sentenced to death (‘An Arc of Electric Skin’), and dangerous interplanetary mining landscapes become the setting for just-in-time rescue missions (‘Blowout’). What struck me most about the collection as a whole is its recurring focus on the human side of systems and states: the legacy of industrial injury across generations, the bitterness of unfulfilled potential, and the pressure to succeed, conform, or escape. Talabi’s strength lies in his ability to highlight the profound human impact within hard-science themes such as environmental collapse, mining, or the oil industry. 

The longer stories stood out for me, such as ‘Saturday’s Song’ and ‘Ganger,’ both beautifully crafted, though in very different styles. ‘Saturday’s Song’ is the haunting sequel to an earlier short piece (‘Wednesday’s Story’) and tells the tale of Saura and Mobola, who fall in love at a financial management conference in Abuja, whose relationship ends in tragedy after Saura’s mother seeks the intervention of Shigidi, the Yoruba deity (Orisha) of nightmares. This Orisha also appears in Talabi’s 2023 novel Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, and Talabi’s use of Yoruba figures, here,  is typical of his ability to weave traditional beliefs between harder science themes found through the collection. Told through the accounts of personified days of the week, the story is multi-layered, spanning the lives of humans and deities and the strange interactions among them and the anthropomorphised calendar. ‘Ganger’ is particularly striking and timely, portraying a segregated society overseen by a megalomaniac tech CEO who, after whisking the wealthy to safety in the wake of a climate catastrophe, creates an indentured class out of pity or necessity, whose lives are micromanaged and whose every action is pre-empted. As Adelaide, the central character, becomes trapped inside a robot built to manage her subservient class after a calamitous attempt to rebel, the reader is left wondering whether she has actually attained a peculiar type of freedom.

I also very much enjoyed ‘Performance Review,’ as a researcher of the future of work, in its portrayal of a meeting between an employee and her boss. As the story unfolds, he proposes she maximise her efficacy by taking an experimental performance-enhancing drug, Optimiline – no obligation, of course, but with the coercive persuasion of a threat of termination. The take brilliantly portrays the dehumanising and flattening effect of corporate performance metrics, shaping employee conduct to fit data points, as well as the creeping effect of encouraging behaviour modifications to achieve what a company perceives as value. I was then surprised to find out that ‘Performance Review’ was written as part of a workshop testing out an AI tool in development – Google’s Wordcraft – as a writing assistant. This makes the story even more fascinating, as an experimental product of emerging technology, the debates about which touch on some of the same themes of the story itself (standardisation, depersonalisation, corporate overreach). Talabi does not shy away from these points in the ‘Authors’ notes’ at the end of the collection, reflecting carefully on how he weighs his optimism for technology and its potential against serious concerns about AI’s impact on the creative industries. These reflections form part of a very informative set of authors’ notes overall, which chart the development of stories, their connections, and the cross-fertilisation of ideas, which provide insight into the writer’s craft. 

Talabi has also written on his writing process and source material elsewhere, for example, in the essay ‘Human and Energy Transitions’ (2026), included in this volume. That piece is an extremely valuable accompaniment to ‘Embers’, a short story in the collection that depicts the downfall of its protagonist, Uduak. Uduak is a once hopeful scholarship recipient in the Nigerian oil industry whose dreams – and life – unravel in the face of new renewable energy technologies (Kawashida cells) that render his career redundant. In the companion essay, Talabi explores the human cost of an industry that refuses to take responsibility for the impact of the dependence it fosters, providing a lifeline to communities through their resources and skills which risk becoming stranded assets. Talabi’s short story captures the nuances of the ‘just transition’ debate through the complexities of a personal story, embracing the fact that people make poor choices and react badly when faced with loss and wounded pride. As Talabi highlights, how can just transitions be truly just when the foundations they are built on are exploitative, extractive, and ‘take a page from the standard colonial playbook’?  

As a collection, broad themes emerge across stories. In no particular order, they are technological advances and industry at a large scale, and the impact of technology on societies or states; the human impact of both work and technology, especially as it echoes across generations; and family ties, including legacies, disappointments, and grief. These themes connect together, recurring and repeating like echoes across stories. In ‘Blowout,’ for example, Folake Adeyemi strives to rescue her brother Femi, part of the N-12 surface exploration crew, battling through both Martian conditions and the emotional turmoil of the circumstances that bear resemblance to their mother’s catastrophic injury decades before, at work on an offshore gas production site near Angola. Talabi portrays the depth and contradictions of traumatic response, as it is not only the impact of the risk her brother is in that is so disturbing to Folake, but also her own actions, as she contemplates how far she is blindly repeating her mother’s devastating heroism.

The familial impact of workplace injury is further portrayed in ‘Abeokuta52,’ partly written in the form of an opinion piece in The Guardian, by the child (Bidemi Akindele) of a researcher studying an alien impact site, after the researcher’s death from the subsequent illness. The opinion piece wraps the details of the events in Nigeria that led to Stella Akindele’s death, alongside Bidemi’s lament at the injustice of her death and concern that she does not suffer a ‘second death’ through her name passing outside of living memory. Thus, ontological questions of time and memory are woven eloquently with the personal and political circumstances described. Like several of the stories in the collection, the piece takes on an experimental form, including the somewhat mysterious online comments below the opinion piece, adding complexity to the portrayal of Government corruption and cover-up. 

The theme of inter-generational and familial trauma tied to industry, exploitation, and sacrifice is once again returned to in ‘A Dream of Electric Mothers,’ which also featured in Africa Risen, the 2022 anthology edited by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, Sherée Renee Thomas, and Zelda Knight. In this story, it is the great-aunt of the protagonist who has given herself to the National Memory Data Server (NMDS), a national computational consciousness based on the recorded thoughts of every previous citizen. This is a profound re-imagining of AI that again brings in ontological dimensions through collectivism that I have also seen in academic work on Ubuntu and AI. Here, in literary form, the lived reality of grief, of having not properly said goodbye to one’s mother, is juxtaposed with ethical considerations of AI decision-making. AI adopts a maternal wisdom that could be fruitfully critically juxtaposed against, for example, the personification of contemporary AI chatbots (Siri, Alexa) as subservient females who aim to please (Sindoni, 2024; West, Kraut and Chew, 2019). It is here that the value of the speculative literary form in relation to knotty and abstract topics is particularly apparent, as through the building of a complete alternative world where a computer system is built on the idea of an ‘electric mother,’ with the wisdom to speak what we need to hear, the contours and limitations of our own technologies and imaginations become more apparent and stark. 

Collectively, the deep intertwining of parental grief, sibling rivalry, and the impacts of technology at an industrial and state scale leave the reader with a deep sense of missed opportunity and injustice. Together, they create a collection that would be valuable to anyone interested in the intersection between humans and technology. 

References:

Sindoni, M.G. (2024). The femininization of AI-powered voice assistants: Personification, anthropomorphism and discourse ideologies. Discourse Context & Media, 62, pp.100833–100833. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100833.

Talabi, W. (2026). ‘Human and Energy Transitions’ in Applied African SF (Ping Press, 2026).

West, M., Kraut, R. and Chew, H.E. (2019). I’d Blush If I could: Closing Gender Divides in Digital Skills through Education. [online] Unesco.org. Available at: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000367416.

Reviewed by Kathleen Hughes

It came as no surprise to me to learn that Wole Talabi is an engineer by profession. Convergence Problems (2024), Talabi’s anthology of short stories, is filled with vivid tales of industrial failure, mechanical faults, and systemic entropy. In the future worlds depicted by Talabi – often set in Nigeria, where he is from – prosperity and investment have come and gone (‘Embers’), citizen dissidents are sentenced to death (‘An Arc of Electric Skin’), and dangerous interplanetary mining landscapes become the setting for just-in-time rescue missions (‘Blowout’). What struck me most about the collection as a whole is its recurring focus on the human side of systems and states: the legacy of industrial injury across generations, the bitterness of unfulfilled potential, and the pressure to succeed, conform, or escape. Talabi’s strength lies in his ability to highlight the profound human impact within hard-science themes such as environmental collapse, mining, or the oil industry. 

The longer stories stood out for me, such as ‘Saturday’s Song’ and ‘Ganger,’ both beautifully crafted, though in very different styles. ‘Saturday’s Song’ is the haunting sequel to an earlier short piece (‘Wednesday’s Story’) and tells the tale of Saura and Mobola, who fall in love at a financial management conference in Abuja, whose relationship ends in tragedy after Saura’s mother seeks the intervention of Shigidi, the Yoruba deity (Orisha) of nightmares. This Orisha also appears in Talabi’s 2023 novel Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, and Talabi’s use of Yoruba figures, here,  is typical of his ability to weave traditional beliefs between harder science themes found through the collection. Told through the accounts of personified days of the week, the story is multi-layered, spanning the lives of humans and deities and the strange interactions among them and the anthropomorphised calendar. ‘Ganger’ is particularly striking and timely, portraying a segregated society overseen by a megalomaniac tech CEO who, after whisking the wealthy to safety in the wake of a climate catastrophe, creates an indentured class out of pity or necessity, whose lives are micromanaged and whose every action is pre-empted. As Adelaide, the central character, becomes trapped inside a robot built to manage her subservient class after a calamitous attempt to rebel, the reader is left wondering whether she has actually attained a peculiar type of freedom.

I also very much enjoyed ‘Performance Review,’ as a researcher of the future of work, in its portrayal of a meeting between an employee and her boss. As the story unfolds, he proposes she maximise her efficacy by taking an experimental performance-enhancing drug, Optimiline – no obligation, of course, but with the coercive persuasion of a threat of termination. The take brilliantly portrays the dehumanising and flattening effect of corporate performance metrics, shaping employee conduct to fit data points, as well as the creeping effect of encouraging behaviour modifications to achieve what a company perceives as value. I was then surprised to find out that ‘Performance Review’ was written as part of a workshop testing out an AI tool in development – Google’s Wordcraft – as a writing assistant. This makes the story even more fascinating, as an experimental product of emerging technology, the debates about which touch on some of the same themes of the story itself (standardisation, depersonalisation, corporate overreach). Talabi does not shy away from these points in the ‘Authors’ notes’ at the end of the collection, reflecting carefully on how he weighs his optimism for technology and its potential against serious concerns about AI’s impact on the creative industries. These reflections form part of a very informative set of authors’ notes overall, which chart the development of stories, their connections, and the cross-fertilisation of ideas, which provide insight into the writer’s craft. 

Talabi has also written on his writing process and source material elsewhere, for example, in the essay ‘Human and Energy Transitions’ (2026), included in this volume. That piece is an extremely valuable accompaniment to ‘Embers’, a short story in the collection that depicts the downfall of its protagonist, Uduak. Uduak is a once hopeful scholarship recipient in the Nigerian oil industry whose dreams – and life – unravel in the face of new renewable energy technologies (Kawashida cells) that render his career redundant. In the companion essay, Talabi explores the human cost of an industry that refuses to take responsibility for the impact of the dependence it fosters, providing a lifeline to communities through their resources and skills which risk becoming stranded assets. Talabi’s short story captures the nuances of the ‘just transition’ debate through the complexities of a personal story, embracing the fact that people make poor choices and react badly when faced with loss and wounded pride. As Talabi highlights, how can just transitions be truly just when the foundations they are built on are exploitative, extractive, and ‘take a page from the standard colonial playbook’?  

As a collection, broad themes emerge across stories. In no particular order, they are technological advances and industry at a large scale, and the impact of technology on societies or states; the human impact of both work and technology, especially as it echoes across generations; and family ties, including legacies, disappointments, and grief. These themes connect together, recurring and repeating like echoes across stories. In ‘Blowout,’ for example, Folake Adeyemi strives to rescue her brother Femi, part of the N-12 surface exploration crew, battling through both Martian conditions and the emotional turmoil of the circumstances that bear resemblance to their mother’s catastrophic injury decades before, at work on an offshore gas production site near Angola. Talabi portrays the depth and contradictions of traumatic response, as it is not only the impact of the risk her brother is in that is so disturbing to Folake, but also her own actions, as she contemplates how far she is blindly repeating her mother’s devastating heroism.

The familial impact of workplace injury is further portrayed in ‘Abeokuta52,’ partly written in the form of an opinion piece in The Guardian, by the child (Bidemi Akindele) of a researcher studying an alien impact site, after the researcher’s death from the subsequent illness. The opinion piece wraps the details of the events in Nigeria that led to Stella Akindele’s death, alongside Bidemi’s lament at the injustice of her death and concern that she does not suffer a ‘second death’ through her name passing outside of living memory. Thus, ontological questions of time and memory are woven eloquently with the personal and political circumstances described. Like several of the stories in the collection, the piece takes on an experimental form, including the somewhat mysterious online comments below the opinion piece, adding complexity to the portrayal of Government corruption and cover-up. 

The theme of inter-generational and familial trauma tied to industry, exploitation, and sacrifice is once again returned to in ‘A Dream of Electric Mothers,’ which also featured in Africa Risen, the 2022 anthology edited by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, Sherée Renee Thomas, and Zelda Knight. In this story, it is the great-aunt of the protagonist who has given herself to the National Memory Data Server (NMDS), a national computational consciousness based on the recorded thoughts of every previous citizen. This is a profound re-imagining of AI that again brings in ontological dimensions through collectivism that I have also seen in academic work on Ubuntu and AI. Here, in literary form, the lived reality of grief, of having not properly said goodbye to one’s mother, is juxtaposed with ethical considerations of AI decision-making. AI adopts a maternal wisdom that could be fruitfully critically juxtaposed against, for example, the personification of contemporary AI chatbots (Siri, Alexa) as subservient females who aim to please (Sindoni, 2024; West, Kraut and Chew, 2019). It is here that the value of the speculative literary form in relation to knotty and abstract topics is particularly apparent, as through the building of a complete alternative world where a computer system is built on the idea of an ‘electric mother,’ with the wisdom to speak what we need to hear, the contours and limitations of our own technologies and imaginations become more apparent and stark. 

Collectively, the deep intertwining of parental grief, sibling rivalry, and the impacts of technology at an industrial and state scale leave the reader with a deep sense of missed opportunity and injustice. Together, they create a collection that would be valuable to anyone interested in the intersection between humans and technology. 

References:

Sindoni, M.G. (2024). The femininization of AI-powered voice assistants: Personification, anthropomorphism and discourse ideologies. Discourse Context & Media, 62, pp.100833–100833. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100833.

Talabi, W. (2026). ‘Human and Energy Transitions’ in Applied African SF (Ping Press, 2026).

West, M., Kraut, R. and Chew, H.E. (2019). I’d Blush If I could: Closing Gender Divides in Digital Skills through Education. [online] Unesco.org. Available at: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000367416.

UK-based publisher Bloomsbury has announced plans to streamline its structure for future growth, after doubling its sales in four years, more than doubling its profits in 2023-2024, and increasing headcount from 738 to 1,238 in five years. The plans include cutting about 55 roles in the US and UK.

The company will restructure its three major editorial divisions to Bloomsbury Global Academic & Professional, Bloomsbury USA, and Bloomsbury Consumer UK. …Read More

The post Bloomsbury Layoffs appeared first on Locus Online.

Mind, body, and spirit-focused publishing company Red Wheel/Weiser has announced that it has acquired the majority of the titles of Watkins Media's flagship imprint, Watkins Publishing. Other Watkins Media imprints, such as Angry Robot, Datura, and Repeater, are not currently affected by the acquisition. Distribution will continue through PRH Publisher Services in the US and Wiley in the UK until July 1, 2026, when Red Wheel/Weiser will begin to …Read More

The post Watkins Publishing Sold appeared first on Locus Online.

Finalists for the Hugo Awards, the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and the Astounding Award for Best New Writer have been announced by LAcon V, the 84th World Science Fiction Convention. There were 1,488 valid nominating ballots received and counted from members of the 2025 and 2026 World Science Fiction Conventions for the 2026 Hugo Awards. Voting on the final ballot will open during May 2026. Members of …Read More

The post 2026 Hugo, Lodestar & <i>Astounding</i> Awards Finalists appeared first on Locus Online.

President and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux Mitzi Angel announced in a memo that the MCD imprint is set to close, with MCD publisher Sean McDonald leaving FSG April 15. Angel cited financial realities for their decision to focus on FSG's core programming, including AUWA Books, FSG Originals, North Point Press, Picador, and Quanta Books.

MCD opened in 2016 at the behest of FSG then-president Jonathan Galassi, naming McDonald …Read More

The post MCD Closes appeared first on Locus Online.

The 42nd annual L. Ron Hubbard's Writers and Illustrators of the Future awards ceremony was held April 16, 2026 at the Taglyan Complex in Los Angeles, concluding a weeklong intensive of workshops, lectures, and classes for the winners. This year's Golden Brush Award went to Bohuslav Argalas Bafu from Slovakia for his illustration of Saffron and Marigolds by Kathleen Powell, and the Golden Pen Award went to Michael Kuester …Read More

The post 2026 Writers & Illustrators of the Future Awards Winners appeared first on Locus Online.

SF author Ian Watson, 82, died April 13, 2026 in Gijón, Spain.

Watson was born in England on April 20, 1943. He graduated from Balliol College, Oxford with a degree in English literature, later obtained a research degree in English and French 19th-century literature, and went on to teach across the world. After his first novel The Embedding (1973) won a John W. Campbell Award, and The Jonah Kit (1975) …Read More

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The six-title shortlist has been announced for the 2026 Dublin Literary Award, now in its 31st year. Authors and titles of genre interest include Gliff by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton; Pantheon) [amazon / bookshop] and Perspective(s) by Laurent Binet, tr. Sam Taylor (Farrar, Straus) [amazon / bookshop].

The initial 69 nominated titles were nominated by 80 libraries from countries around the world. Titles eligible for the 2026 award were published …Read More

The post 2026 Dublin Literary Award Shortlist appeared first on Locus Online.

PEN America has announced plans to launch a US Author Safety Program meant to protect against harassment and threats. Supporters include Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Random House, David Baldacci, and the New York Community Trust, which have contributed nearly $1 million to the program thus far. PEN America is seeking further support and will hold an auction in spring 2026 to benefit the program.

The safety program follows …Read More

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Roger Zelazny (1937-1995) has been named the recipient of the fourth Infinity Award.

The award was created by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) to posthumously highlight the life and work of creators who achieved a distinct and tremendous legacy in science fiction and fantasy. Although they are no longer with us to celebrate this honor, these writers helped to lay the foundation for today's science fiction, fantasy, …Read More

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