Industry News

Catherynne M. Valente has packed a lot into the first 20 years of her career. Her genre-busting work runs the gamut from alternative history to fairytale fantasy to cosmic horror. In addition to writing 27 novels and novellas, she has multiple collections of short fiction and poetry. She is also the creator of a six-year-old human, but motherhood shows no signs of slowing her down. Space Opera, her 2018 bestseller about an interplanetary Eurovision Song Contest, was shortlisted for Best Novel at the Hugo Awards. Her new novel, Space Oddity, picks up where Space Opera left off and reflects contemporary concerns like pandemics, online misinformation, and the threat of all-out war. https://www.catherynnemvalente.com/

Tony Conn is a writer and filmmaker with an interest in all things strange. He is perhaps the world’s leading expert on the Megatron, a flying saucer-shaped restaurant that used to adorn the Cambridgeshire countryside and now features in Space Oddity. https://tonyconn.com/

TC: Could you tell us about your background and early influences?

CV: My parents met at UCLA and divorced when I was very young. I had two stepparents most of my childhood and went back and forth between Seattle and northern California. My dad was an aspiring filmmaker who went into advertising instead, which is very much a family thing on my father’s side. A lot of them intended to be artists and ended up in the family business. My mother is a retired political science professor. She was in her master’s and PhD programmes through almost every portion of my early life that I can remember. She was working for the mayor of Seattle, getting her degrees in public policy, doing advocacy work, and she’s a pretty hardcore statistician as well.

They were in their early twenties when they had me. They had no sense of what was appropriate for a child. I had no boundaries as to what I could read, or watch, or anything. I just had to be vocal about when it was too much for me, which is kind of a modern parenting idea. My mother read Plato’s Republic to me as a bedtime story, specifically The Myth of Er, which is this allegory about what happens when we die. At five, she had me read The Breasts of Tiresias by Apollinaire. It’s above the pay grade of adults, let alone a small child. My mother had no sense of that. In my mom’s house, there are stacks of books that are now end tables. Cairns of books everywhere.

Both of my birthparents are big musical theatre people, so I grew up seeing musicals all the time. I’ve always had this really low voice, since I was ten. I wanted to be a singer, but there weren’t any parts for somebody with a voice like mine. My mom also has a master’s degree in drama, so I remember when Beaumarchais was a big thing in our house. At eleven, all that anybody talked about was The Barber of Seville.

I had a lot of influences from my parents. My mom read every murder mystery. My dad is hardcore science fiction. And then, my stepmother Kim is the world’s biggest Stephen King fan. Horror was my first love, both as a reader and a writer.

TC: Is it a coincidence you ended up living in Maine?

CV: I would like to pretend I did not move to Maine because I got obsessed with Stephen King as a small child, but that would be a lie. I read Stephen King by the time I was nine. I found Salem’s Lot in the garage and sat down on the floor to read it. I was obsessed with Maine as a child. To me, it seemed like that’s where they kept the magic. In all the books I read, the magic is in Britain, or Europe, but in Stephen King there was this place in America where horrible but magical things could happen. Recently, I was invited to contribute to an anthology of new stories set in the world of The Stand called The End of the World as We Know It, so I got to write in Stephen King’s universe as a grown-up.

TC: You’ve mentioned elsewhere that you have ADHD. Does that go some way to explaining how prolific you are, and the way you jump between genres and styles?

CV: Yeah. I really can’t do the same thing twice in a row. It nearly kills me. Part of my brain is desperately trying to wander off and find something new to do, so I do jump genres a lot. Maybe I would’ve had a more successful career if I had stuck to one thing, but I just can’t do that. The thing that I enjoy the most is writing something unexpected, that people think I would never write. I’m always looking for that thing that kicks off my imagination, that hyperfocus.

Honestly, it’s not good for me to take a long time to write a book. The best way to do it is to have between eight and twelve weeks, and produce an entire manuscript in that time, all the research having been done. I can believe in myself and the project and everything else for about that amount of time before it all crumbles and falls apart. I didn’t know I had ADHD till I already had several books out, but I do think The Orphan’s Tales (2006), which was my first big New York book, I should have been able to give to a doctor and receive a prescription.

TC: One strand that runs through your work is remix culture – turning genres on their heads, taking new perspectives in stories that might seem familiar. Do you think that reflects the times we live in?

CV: Yeah. We’re pretty far past postmodernism. We screwed up by calling it postmodernism, and now nobody knows what to say next about that kind of thing. I remember, in creative writing classes in college, being told to not use modern pop culture references because it dates your work. I think that, for science fiction people, it’s just not the same. Using modern cultural references in order to introduce something totally alien as a culture is really helpful, and we would be loath to give it up. I think a lot of that has changed with things like Don DeLillo’s White Noise, which I’m not a huge fan of, but it’s impossible to argue it’s not totally seminal. I think it certainly changed with the advent of the internet. We’re constantly making memetic references to the point where we sound like that Star Trek episode with Darmok and Jalad. The progress of memetic culture is fascinating.

TC: Were you surprised by how successful Space Opera was?

CV: I think we all were. It was supposed to be a novella, for one thing. We all thought it was going to be pretty niche. No Americans knew what Eurovision was at the time. Thank you, Will Ferrell, for that movie (Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga). I no longer have to give a short TED talk on what Eurovision is before I give a reading. The idea of an American writing a comedy about Eurovision for Americans, which would appeal to neither Americans nor Europeans, who don’t want to hear an American’s opinions on Eurovision – none of us really thought it was going to be a big hit.

Then, that first print run sold out weeks before the book came out. We went through something like nine editions in the first six weeks because we just couldn’t keep it in stock. Popular Mechanics had it on their Father’s Day gift guide, so it was: whiskey, knives, boots, book with a disco ball and girl whose name is spelled funny on it. Just wildly strange. Almost no publicity was done for it. It was all word of mouth. We were all very shocked, and it sold movie rights right away. Unfortunately, Covid killed that project, but it is under development as an animated series right now.

TC: I was going to ask about that…

CV: Yeah, so Universal picked it up almost immediately, less than a month after the book came out. There was a whole team. We had songwriters. It was a going thing, and then, you know, Covid killed a lot of things. Everybody involved still wants to do it, but it just wasn’t meant to be. Never before have I had an option expire and attached to that email was the next option offer, because they’d been waiting for it to expire.

I think, in retrospect, that an animated series is a better destiny for it. It doesn’t cost nearly as much to animate all those aliens as it does to CG them, and I think that you can do a lot more with the structure of an animated series than you can with a two-hour feature film. For the same kind of reason, it’s always been so difficult to adapt Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The nub of Hitchhiker’s Guide, and it’s true of Space Opera as well, is those expository comedy bits explaining some little aspect of the world. That’s most of what people remember, not necessarily the plot.

Lower Decks has been great at doing good science fiction while still being comedy. I think we have a lot of examples of how to do more elevated animated series these days than back when I was a kid, and it was The Simpsons or nothing. 

TC: Space Opera and Space Oddity contain a lot of British references, like Douglas Adams, Doctor Who, Monty Python, David Bowie. Would you describe yourself as an Anglophile?

CV: I think it’s a complicated thing. We are taught so much British culture in America, to the point that it can feel like American literature, even in our own colleges, is a secondary concern. Britain, and British culture, has been excellent at spreading and taking root all over the place, for good and for ill. I guess I’m an Anglophile, but when you grow up on fairy tales and King Arthur, you end up having this idea about the UK.

I went to university in Edinburgh, and that’s part of why the band in Space Opera and Space Oddity is British. At the time, I thought it would be funny because of the UK’s traditional placement in Eurovision. Then, of course, a few years after the book came out, it’s hosted in Liverpool with a song called Space Man, because of course.

And good Lord, who doesn’t love Douglas Adams? I wouldn’t want to meet that person. When I wrote the first chapters of Space Opera, I wrote it very quickly, and I was really happy with it. I’d never done anything that was first and foremost a comedy. But I had to sit back and say, “Alright, so you have Brits in space, and you’re writing it like this. You’re going to get compared to Douglas Adams. Are you comfortable with that? Are you cool with hearing how you didn’t live up to Douglas Adams?” I decided that I was okay with that, and to some extent it took some pressure off. Was I going to sit down to write the great science fiction comedy novel? Absolutely not. I could shoot for the bronze, and it would be fine.

There are several references to Douglas Adams throughout both books. He’s a brilliant and unsurpassable talent, and I adore his work. Terry Pratchett as well. All of the things that you mentioned. To be allowed to hang out outside the house where they all once lived is fine for me. I can hang out in the garden. 

TC: Did you have to do a lot of research into British slang and regional dialects?

CV: Not really, because I did live there. I think I made it harder for myself, because there are things that bother me when Americans write British characters. I didn’t want to overuse “bloody.” I didn’t want to use “Oi, guvnor!” I didn’t want to do any of that stuff. I gave myself three “bloody”s per book and had to be a little bit more creative with my intensifiers.

TC: I believe all the members of the band are of mixed heritage…

CV: They are, which is important to me, and very deliberate.

TC: Did that involve a lot of research, into British-Asian culture, for example?

CV: Yeah, that did involve more research. That was more for the first book, because those characters are defined by the second. Richard Ayoade has the same kind of cultural background that Decibel Jones has, so I listened to a lot of interviews with him. There’s a lot of Ayoade’s voice in Dess.

You always want to do the absolute best you can, even in comedy. I’m sure that there are mistakes. There’s always mistakes. But it was important to me to have this plucky, punky band that is made up of Britons who have a heritage that is not just of the British Isles, because that’s such a huge part of Britain’s history and heritage.

TC: You have a playful attitude towards gender and sexuality in the Space Opera books. Was that something you consciously wanted to explore? Do you think science fiction is a good way to do that?

CV: I think it’s a great way to explore that. There is no reason an alien species should conform to our ideas of gender. Much of the animal kingdom doesn’t. Once you get outside mammals, you have all kinds of different combinatory ways of reproducing. I wanted to be honest about how weird aliens should be. My rule was: You must be at least as weird as things we already know about.

Within the alien species, I wanted to have a huge variety of gender expression, and then rock stars have always been a little bit exempt from the kind of judgement that us normal people get. Freddie Mercury and David Bowie were totally acceptable to play in straight, regular households, and they were wildly nonconforming. I wanted to have a lot of fun with that. I’m queer myself and I felt like, particularly in this day and age, if you’re going to do Brits in Space, there’s no reason not to push it a little further, make it a little gayer and younger and stranger, particularly because two of the genres of cultural expression that often get exempt from prohibitions against your own expression are comedy and music.

The other way that the species’ anatomy came about is reverse-engineering it from the kind of music that I wanted them to represent. Music has a lot to do with our anatomy. The beats that feel natural to us. Our own heartbeat, that’s the beat that we have in our bodies all the time. We have ten fingers. It determines the kinds of instruments that we play. If we had twelve, we’d be playing different kinds of instruments. The resonance chamber created by our inner ear and skull determines the range of sound that we enjoy and don’t enjoy. If you have a completely different anatomy, it would be a completely different kind of music.

TC: Is there an overarching narrative to the series?

CV: I very rarely have an overarching plan. It’s that ADHD again. I want to keep myself surprised constantly. I try not to plan prescriptively too much, because then my brain thinks it’s already done this book and will go on permanent hiatus.

TC: You said you hate to do the same thing twice. Did you feel under pressure to recreate the first Space Opera book in Space Oddity?

CV: Sure, a little bit. I knew when I finished writing Space Opera that I would probably want to go back to that world. The first one doesn’t end on a cliffhanger, but there’s obvious threads to another story there. I didn’t really want to commit to it until I had an idea for what book was going to be. It was about a year before we sold the sequel, and then it was like, “Well, can I get back into that voice?” I ended up folding it into the sequel, that anxiety about your difficult second album, and what happens to the Hero’s Journey when you’re done with it.

When I first started writing it, Covid had happened. I had Covid in February 2021, when I was finishing the book. We are very fortunate it’s in English and paragraphs because I was completely delirious. I went and quarantined at a friend’s house for eight days and, even in my feverish brain, I thought, “I will never again have eight days to myself, so if I’m going to finish this book, I have to do it now.”

Because Eurovision was cancelled, it seemed to me that’s what the book had to be about on some level. But by the time that I was editing it, Russia had invaded Ukraine and then removed themselves from Eurovision, and I felt like what the book was about had to change a little bit too.

TC: Did it feel cathartic to write this satire of what was going on at the time?

CV: Yeah. Covid was really rough for writers. You need to experience things. It’s a real part of the process, at least for me, and to suddenly have no input but your own four walls made it so strange. I live on a little island in Maine. I couldn’t even get food delivery. We have one store that everyone goes to and one boat that you have to take to get to the mainland. People lost their minds. It was really hard to make something that’s new and exciting when nothing was new and exciting.

TC: You wrote a touching dedication to Christopher Priest in the new book. You also lost a lot of family members while writing it. Can you tell us how that affected you?

CV: Between the start of lockdown and the end of 2021, my husband and I lost 13 family members. It was gruelling. There were times when it was just month by month. My husband’s grandmother died during my grandfather’s funeral. It’s hard to write comedy when everyone around you is suffering. I think the books that I wrote during this time, Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods (2022), which is literally a book about death, and Space Oddity, are lobbed into the future to explain what we were all going through. It’s weird when your own life starts to fall apart at the same time the world is falling apart, because you can’t tell which of that is your problem and which of that is that everything’s messed up.

The world has gone absolutely spare in the last several years. I don’t like people pretending that it’s not unprecedented. It is. None of us experienced a pandemic before. That’s new for all of us, and no-one’s getting therapy about it. I think Space Oddity is partly me working through it. It takes time to make art out of trauma, because the trauma has to stop before you can make art. There has to be a minute where you’re not being actively traumatised to process all of that into art. I think we will see everybody’s Covid novels over the course of the next 10 or 15 years, as people have different speeds of processing and writing.

TC: Does having a child mean that you see literature through a new lens?

CV: In some ways. The thing that is bringing me a lot of joy right now, as my kid’s just turned six, is sharing some of the more complex young reader books that I loved as a kid, between The Hobbit and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. There’s this book called Seaward, by Susan Cooper, that most people have never heard of, but it was absolutely my favourite when I was little. A lot of the fiction that I’ve been taking in is rediscovering those things that I loved so much as a young reader.

In Space Oddity, there’s the whole bit in the beginning about the Blowout, which is what happens to first contact cultures when they finally get a chance to process what they’ve gone through, and they all lose their minds. The comparison is to a baby’s blowout diaper. It’s obviously right from my kid. Also, for a long time, I couldn’t read or watch anything where bad things happened to children. I just couldn’t handle it. I’m starting to get over that now, but I still am a lot more squeamish about that than I used to be. It does change your perspective somewhat.

I still think of this child as like a rogue AI that I’m slowly programming. You will tell them something and they will take it completely literally. When they were a little younger, we said, “This is your body. It belongs to you. Nobody can do anything to your body that you don’t consent to.” So, I get a phone call from daycare because my son has pushed a little girl off a chair into the gravel, and nobody knows why it happened. The minute we walk away, the three-year-old tells me, “Brooklyn would not stop singing Let It Go into my ear, and my ear is part of my body, and I get to say what happens to my body, and nobody can do anything to my body that I don’t consent to.” I’m like, “Okay, well, thank you for listening to that lesson. You still can’t push somebody. That means you’re doing something to her body.” It’s the most perfect example of how a robot would interpret that instruction. How I think about AI and how people learn things has certainly changed a lot, watching this ball of id slowly grow a superego.

TC: Do you have any other projects that people should look out for?

CV: Space Oddity is the big thing. I’m coming up on finishing a new novel for Tor called Nobody But Us. I have a number of short stories coming out in quick succession in 2025, including the Stephen King anthology, The End of the World as We Know It. I have stories coming out in Uncanny and an anthology called The Book of the Dead.

Space Oddity is released on 9th January 2025 in the UK.

Voting has opened for the 2025 Fanzine Activity Achievement (FAAn) Awards, recognizing work done in 2024. Categories last year included: Best Genzine, Best Perzine, Best Fan Writer, Best Fan Artist, Best Letterhack, Best Cover Art, and Best Special Publication. Voting is open to anyone, and no memberships or fees are required. ‘The Incompleat Register 2024′ voters’ guide is available online. Results will be announced at the Corflu 42 banquet on ...Read More

Author Andrew Pyper, 56, died January 3, 2025 at home in Toronto, Canada of cancer. Pyper published 14 novels, many thrillers with speculative elements.

Andrew Derek Pyper was born January 4, 1968 in Stratford, Ontario, Canada. He graduated from McGill University with an English degree, and went to law school at the University of Toronto. Though he passed the Bar in 1996, he never practiced law, instead becoming a full-time ...Read More

The judges for the 2025 World Fantasy Awards have been empaneled.

The judges will read and consider eligible materials from 2024 between now (January 6, 2025) and June 1, 2025. To be considered for awards, all materials must be received by all five judges and Peter Dennis Pautz by June 1, 2025. “If… something is received on May 31 the judges may well have only one day to read it ...Read More

Wizard’s Tower Press has an­nounced the new Wiz Duo novella series, edited by Roz Clarke and Joanne Hall, to launch in early 2025. Each volume “will contain two novella-length stories from different writers.” The first two books include stories by David Gullen and Ben Wright, and Juliet Kemp and E.M. Faulds. Their novellas were first acquired by the now-defunct Grimbold Books. Publisher Cheryl Morgan said:

While I love reading novellas, ...Read More

Author Stephen King is shutting down the three independent radio stations he owns in Bangor ME: WZON, WZLO, and WKIT. They are expected to go offline on De­cember 31, 2024. King said, “While radio across the country has been overtaken by giant corporate broadcasting groups, I’ve loved being a local, in­dependent owner all these years,” but the stations have never been profitable, with King covering the revenue shortfalls personally. Now, ...Read More

George Zebrowski (28 December 1945–20 December 2024) was a prolific writer and anthologist. He edited three Nebula anthologies and headed SFWA’s committee that oversaw the selection of editors for Nebula Awards anthologies from 1983-95. His collection of Bulletins and Forums now makes up the majority of SFWA’s archives at Northern Illinois University. He was editor of the SFWA Bulletin during 1970 to 1975, and then, jointly with his long-time partner Pamela Sargent from 1983 to 1991. Together they won the Service to SFWA Award in 2000.

Born in Austria, Zebrowski moved to the US at age five. He attended one of the first Clarion Writers’ Workshops in 1968 at age 22, and, notably, rose quickly to publication, in collaboration with Jack Dann in 1970 with “Traps” and “Dark, Dark, the Dead Star” and his own “The Water Sculptor of Station 233.” Two years later, his first novel, Omega Point, was published with Ace Books. He went on to write more than a hundred published short stories and essays, along with twenty-one novels, including Star Trek tie-in works. He also edited more than a dozen anthologies, including five volumes of Synergy: New Science Fiction. Zebrowski won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1999 with his book Brutal Orbits, and he served on the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award jury from 2005-2013. Three of his short stories, “Heathen God,” “The Eichmann Variations,” and “Wound the Wind,” were Nebula Award nominees. 

Paul Levinson, former SFWA President, says, “George Zebrowski was a science fiction writer’s science fiction writer. What I mean by that is he was as passionate and committed to loving science fiction—thinking about it, writing about it, and of course, writing it—as he was when he first encountered it. When George called me, or when we met at a convention, I truly felt like I was 12 years old again, consumed by and beaming with that sense of wonder.  I guess it never leaves most teenage fans of the genre, but it more than didn’t leave George—he constantly contributed to it with his electric and eclectic imagination. It was truly a privilege to know him, and wherever he is now, he’s also permanently somewhere in my brain, and no doubt the minds of many lucky others.”

Writer and editor James Morrow recalls, “Before I knew George Zebrowski, I knew about him. The connection remains vivid in my memory. Sometime in the early 1980’s, I was hanging out with a filmmaker friend in his Boston apartment, where we were eventually joined by an accomplished book critic (his name escapes me) who specialized in science fiction. I had recently published my first novel, a dystopian satire called The Wine of Violence, that owed its existence primarily to Swift and Voltaire. At the time I was largely ignorant of contemporary SF, and I felt ambivalent about continuing to write in that genre. The critic told me that, if I wanted to appreciate the stylistic, intellectual, and sociopolitical feats of which SF was capable, I should read two recent novels without delay: In the Ocean of Night by Gregory Benford and Macrolife by George Zebrowski. I had heard of neither book (and neither writer), but I followed the critic’s advice. And so it was that, by dazzling me with the intensity of their imaginations and the range of their philosophic and scientific passions, Benford and Zebrowski inadvertently convinced me to remain in the SF field. Eventually I got to know George in person, and he quickly proved an admirable colleague, tirelessly working behind the scenes in SFWA politics and SF publishing (often to my personal benefit). Thank you, dear George. Ave atque vale. I owe you more than I can say.”

Writer Jack Dann says, in summary of a lifelong friendship, “George was one of the most ethical and moral people I’ve ever known. He simply could not embrace cynicism. He persisted in doing good deeds for people he did not even know because it was the right thing to do. For example: after discovering that a publisher was not paying proper royalties, he spent months negotiating until the writers involved received ‘windfall’ royalties amounting to thousands of dollars. George Zebrowski the writer…? His intellectual contemporaries were Arthur C. Clarke and Stanislaw Lem—Clarke was a longtime friend and correspondent. Like Clarke and Lem, George was interested in rigorously extrapolating ideas into plausible, possible future realities. He turned cold equations into futures that we could imagine living in. Quintessential thought experiments. If you would like to experience his excoriating insights and genius, take a look at what I consider his magnum opus: Macrolife: a Mobile Utopia. To sum up. George: brilliant, cranky, generous, loveable, and passionate about everything that interested him. A fiercely devoted friend. An argument ready to happen. Someone who did not—could not—suffer fools gladly. Well, perhaps he did because he suffered through our friendship for almost sixty years! Vale, my brother…”

George Zebrowski lived 78 years.

The post In Memoriam: George Zebrowski appeared first on SFWA.

Asimov‘s magazine has opened up the ballot for its 39th annual Readers’ Award. On the ballot, available here, readers can select their favorite Asimov’s short stories, novellas, novelettes, poems, and covers from 2024. The poll closes on February 1, 2025.

Founded in 1977 by Isaac Asimov and Joel Davis, Asimov’s publishes science fiction, poetry, editorials, and non-fiction. For more on the magazine’s history, see here.

While you are here, please ...Read More

Analog Science Fiction and Fact has opened up its annual poll for the Analytical Laboratory of reader favorites. On the ballot, available here, readers select their favorite Analog short stories, novellas, covers, articles, and more. The poll closes on February 1, 2025.

Analog, begun in 1930 as Astounding Stories, publishes science fiction and articles on science and technology. For more information about the magazine, see here.

While you are here, ...Read More

by the SFWA Publications Crew

In recent years, The SFWA Blog has undergone many changes and refinements to serve its community better. Where we once had a single editor, we’re now a team that reviews pitches collectively and looks for ways to bring more voices into the conversation. This past year was an especially exciting time for us because we were able to launch more open calls and elevate the excellent work of committees such as History, Indie, and Game Writing: volunteer-run initiatives here at SFWA that advocate for writers in different fields of the SFF industry.

The SFWA Blog is a free-to-read service—no membership necessary!—and our mission in 2025 is to continue growing conversations of value to professional and professionalizing writers in SFF.

Going forward, we’re partnering with more SFWA advocacy groups to bring their expertise to The Blog, and we’re developing conversations we began this year through our open calls. On our Highlights page, you can currently explore articles in our “Writing from History,” “Writing by Other Means,” and “Perspectives in Translation” conversations, along with limited series like “Playtesting Game Narratives” and long-term committee offerings from History, Indie, Romance, and Safety. We’ll be growing our list to include special topics, like articles about action-writing and worldbuilding, and seeking more roundtable and interview opportunities.

More details are available on our Submission Guidelines page for these open calls:

• Lessons Learned
• Perspectives in Translation
• Volunteer Networks: The Heart of SFF
• Writing by Other Means
• Writing from History

What Do We Want at The SFWA Blog?

Despite the range of highlights you can read to get a sense of the publication and the thorough guidelines available to would-be Blog writers, many still struggle at the pitch stage.

If you’re considering submitting an article pitch to The Blog, we’d love to read it! Here are some tips to help you create a successful pitch:

1. We love work that addresses writers at all stages of their careers, but we most often receive pitches that address an audience of complete novices. We would love to see more pitches that go past a basic introduction to a topic and more work that addresses the needs of a mid-career writer/creator in SFF.
2. We love work that explores lesser-known experiences. Although every topic can do with a refresher piece occasionally, we have a range of creators in SFF who rarely get a platform to discuss what makes their niche special. Let’s change that together.
3. We prioritize work that doesn’t simply promote a single author, organization, or professional service. (And that includes self-promotion: the best self-promotion, for us, is an author who demonstrates their talent for writing through their mastery of other article topics.) We’re more interested in exploring a concept holistically, so give us collective histories or technical discussions that include a wider range of product options.
4. We love work that uplifts rather than tearing down. Sometimes, well-meaning writers will pitch us articles that focus on how [X] text got [Y] representation wrong. These don’t tend to make it past the pitch phase. The author’s heart is in the right place, but stronger pitches will center work that gets [Y] representation right. This is also important because writers from [Y] demographic sometimes simply don’t know about the wonderful work already being done by other members of their demographic.
5. Relatedly, we love it when writers don’t feel that they have to carry a whole demographic on their own. Everyone has a distinct and wonderful voice. No group is a hivemind, so please pitch us work based on your experience in [Y] demographic rather than feeling pressured to represent The One True Experience for the whole.
6. Although we avoid blatant self-promotion, we welcome your singular, first-person experiences—so please feel free to use personal anecdotes to frame the professional core of your piece. Conversely, though, you do not have to include any personal details if you don’t want to. It’s only in pitches discussing technical topics (e.g., scientific subfields, medical know-how, or martial arts) that relevant experience in either the pitch or author’s bio will help us evaluate the submission.
7. Lastly, we love work that challenges our expectations. This doesn’t mean being controversial for the sake of controversy, but we sometimes see pitches that advocate for methodologies we disagree with—and then we ask ourselves if there’s a body of writers who might benefit from the perspective all the same. No two writers are alike, and having a team of editors allows us to signal-boost a range of perspectives. So don’t ever feel like you have to submit something based on the professional preferences of our editors! Write with a demonstrated level of authority about your point of view instead.

The Nitty Gritty of Your Submission

The SFWA Blog editorial team meets monthly to consider your submissions. While we discourage flooding our inbox with too many pitches, if you’ve sent one and haven’t heard back yet, feel free to send another along in the same window if inspiration strikes again.

In your pitch, give us a clear sense of what the article will cover so we can better evaluate your proposal. If you want to approach a subject from many different angles, please let us know. If you want to bring multiple authors/works into discussion, please list them in the pitch. If you think of structuring your article as an argument, give us a sense of the steps that get you to your conclusion.

If you get a rejection from us, please know that there are many possible reasons for a declined pitch, and you’ll find the most common listed in that email. Read them carefully, consider which ones might explain your situation, and then please feel free to submit anew.

This was a terrific year for getting more open calls and committee series off the ground, but we’re just getting started at The SFWA Blog. There’s always so much more to say and do for this weekly conversation among professional and professionalizing writers in SFF.

We hope you’ll engage with us next year by reading The SFWA Blog, commenting on or sharing articles, and submitting your own pitches. We on the editorial team very much look forward to the work that lies ahead. Join us!

The post What Should I Pitch to The SFWA Blog? appeared first on SFWA.

Kazuo Ishiguro is the first name on the 2025 King Charles III New Year’s Honours list. The list gives Ishiguro the Companion of Honour distinction, which BBC.com notes as rare, as it is “a select group which is limited to 65 people at any one time.” Jacqueline Wilson DBE is next on the High Awards list, given the Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire. The complete list ...Read More

The 2024 Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund (TAFF), which “will send a European fan to the 2025 Worldcon in Seattle,” has selected its nominees and will begin voting on January 1, 2025.

The candidates for this year are Zi Graves, Mikołaj Kowalewski, and Jan Vaněk jr. Voting is open to any individual with their donation of £3 or $4 to TAFF. The ballot is available here.

TAFF “was created in 1953 for ...Read More

The 28th ICon was held October 20-22, 20-24 in Tel Aviv, Israel, and included almost 350 panels, lectures, workshops, games, and roleplaying. Some 11,000 tickets were sold to the different events. In each of the three days, at a certain point, entrance to the venue had to be restricted to those who had tickets, because the 1,800 people limit on premises, set for health and safety reasons, was reached.

The ...Read More

The bitterness and the spark  

I am sixteen, in a secondary school ‘Introduction to Philosophy’ class, and I am learning of Solipsism for the first time. For the uninitiated and/or the non-skeptics, the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy defines it as follows, at least in its most radical iteration:

[Solipsism posits that] one’s own immediate experience has a fundamental, self-certifying reality and that comparable knowledge of ‘physical’ or ‘public’ items is unobtainable. (Honderich, ed., 1995, p.218).

I am terrified, as any introvert often overwhelmed by the intensity of their inner life would be terrified. The ‘physical’ and the ‘public’ instantly became concepts of doubt, and objects of fallibility. Such concepts are of course cliché in the world of SF: a genre that has, for decades, explored the paradoxes of the self, and the strange new worlds that could exist at the limits of our perception. Drugs, religion, virtual reality, dimensional travel, mind-transference: these are just some avenues via which the self may be expanded—and sometimes even obliterated—in service of access to a greater, or somehow ‘truer,’ experience.

…Of course: you know I don’t romanticize my beloved genre that easily.

SF narratives don’t always elicit the oohs and aahs of cosmic collectivity, as often as we might wish them to. For every astral reunion through realities separated as breath between lips, there are genocidal boys’ stories of colonial derring-do that exterminate entire alien societies; for every mind-altering encounter with an astral god, or any other form of divinity, there is invoked the (laughable) threat of enforced homosexuality, used as a foil to ‘prove’ the degeneracy of human civilization across time. I could go on. For its touted expansiveness and offerings of pleasurable escape, science fiction, as I always tell my students, is perhaps the most nakedly political of all literary genres.

But when we read or watch ‘escapist’ stories, what, exactly, is it that we wish to escape from? It seems to me that to seek escape from something implies at least implicit awareness of one’s guilt. For what reason should we feel guilty? For what, and for whom, should we feel?

Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker opens with arguably one of the loveliest lines in science fiction: “One night when I had tasted bitterness I went out onto the hill” (Stapledon, 1987, p.1). This ‘bitter’ sensation has spoiled the “decade and a half”-long relationship with the narrator’s wife, and even the births of their two children, in spite (or perhaps because of?) the ghost of divinity, something transcendent in their pairing, in contrast with the banal coziness of their existence together: “There, under that roof, our own two lives, recalcitrant sometimes to one another, were all the while thankfully one, one larger, more conscious life, than either alone” (Stapledon, p.2). Star Maker’s narrator has done everything right: made a home, borne children, become something larger than himself, his relationship, the quartet of ‘I’s’ that form the core of his world. And yet: recalcitrance, unease, even “horror,” lingers.

After traveling through the cosmos and encountering a bewildering array of nonhuman lives, the narrator meets the titular Star Maker—the grand dreamer of the whole universe—and finds, among the love, that there is cruelty, and sympathy, and passion, all “contemplated” by some vast and inscrutable mind. The being is beyond ethics, somehow, having witnessed myriad forms of sentience (including bird-like telepaths that wheel in huge flocks across a planet’s skies), and offers, I suggest, an answer to the question I asked earlier: for what, and for whom, should we feel? 

Everything, and everyone. 

But the narrator is dissatisfied. Afraid, even. It is perhaps too much to bear witness to, and certainly too much to ask of a human organism.

Talking of fear: I am thirty-seven, and too sad to be concerned by ‘dead internet theory’ that suggests that, in the en-shittified 21st-century internet, the majority of content is produced and consumed by bots ‘speaking’ to one another. The promise of a vast ‘web’ of human consciousness—akin to the multitudes of sentient lives held in Stapledon’s narrative—doesn’t even provide human dross anymore, only dross; language is ingested, hacked up, repeated and linked and relinked to nothingness, speaking of nothing, only making-the-motions-of.

I am thirty-seven, and too amused to be terrified at the Tesla-unveiled robotic companions that may or may not be voiced remotely by an operator responding to vocal inputs, becoming nothing more than humanoid cyberpunk telephones.

I want to be overwhelmed by the conviction of other minds, and their assurance that everything will be alright in the end—and even if it won’t be, I want another human being to tell me that.

This is, of course, a classic philosophical problem—and each of the authors in this landmark issue explore, in their own ways, how knowledge of and connection with others is obtainable. Can reading give us irrefutable access to other minds, and even generate empathy? Is the idea of generating empathy for (especially marginalized) others in fact a “grotesque dynamic,” after Namwali Serpell (The New York Review, 2019)? Do capitalist-alternative video games hold insights into how we can exist without exploiting one another? How does a necktie consolidate community history? What can the horror genre offer to allay (or amplify) our anxieties, and what monstrosities can it bring to light in a Freudian excision of the fears of the id?

This is issue 300 of Vector, on the theme of Community! It should be a celebration! And make no mistake—it is a celebration of that. Community. The people who make, and made, literary life-worlds. It is also a lament at the relentless change that follows us across the years: change that sees friendships cement and fall apart, that sees creative idols shape entire generations and then fall in disgrace, that sees spaces—both physical and ideological—inched open by cracks and then blown open, wide, seemingly overnight, and precious groups forming and falling apart as their members age and pass. It is younger generations struggling to keep alive the physical meeting spaces of conferences and conventions when expenses are so high, and wages are so low. It is a yearning for persistent physicality, because despite the hours we spend straining our eyes ‘connecting’ with others on screens we realize, profoundly, that the screen is not enough.

So: out with it! Let’s have the pages. We are three hundred issues of scholarly inquiry, of impassioned creation and reviews and conversations. (We have the screens, of course, too, as our lively blog attests to). I hope we will be three hundred more issues.

We celebrate community. We celebrate the joy we can bring to each other even as we hold, in our other hand/s, the damage we can do to one another: the bitterness and the spark. I’ll leave you with Stapledon, again, this time with words from his moving novel Death Into Life (Stapledon, 1946, p.48):

“As centers of awareness we remain eternally distinct; but in participation in our ‘we,’ each ‘I’ awakens to be an ampler, richer ‘I,’ whose treasure is not ‘myself,’ but ‘we.’”

Warmth and light,

Phoenix

References

Honderich, T. (1995) The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford University Press, USA.

Serpell, N. (2020) The banality of empathy. http://www.nybooks.com/online/2019/03/02/the-banality-of-empathy/.

Stapledon, O. (1987) Star Maker. J P Tarcher.

Stapledon, O. (1946) Death Into Life.

by Ira Nayman

Early in my short-story writing career, I received a delightful email from an anthology editor who had accepted one of my works. “The hard part is over,” she wrote. “Your story has been accepted. Compared to this, editing will be easy.”

What did this editor mean? If a magazine gets 200 submissions per issue and can only accept 10 stories (to make the math easy), they are very likely to receive more than enough stories that are structurally sound, allowing them to accept only stories that do not require basic story or character reworking. Creating a story that will beat 1-in-20 odds of acceptance takes a lot of work; compared to that, rewriting as part of the editorial process is easy.

Years later, having worked as an editor, it occurred to me that the email contained a certain… defensiveness. I now find it easy to believe that, having dealt with writers who fought every editorial decision, the editor was trying to preempt protracted battles over relatively minor details.

The Writer’s Perspective

Many writers resist the editorial process for a variety of reasons. It takes a lot of time, thought and, ultimately, work to craft effective prose fiction; it can be galling to allow a stranger to come along and tell you that it has to be changed. In addition, it can be hard to accept that what you have put so much of yourself into is not perfect exactly as you wrote it. These issues can be overcome with experience. All you need is one great editor to help you see the flaws in a story and guide you through the process of correcting them to see the value in the process.

I suspect that part of the reason many writers resist the input of editors is because they find rewriting a chore. However, as Ernest Hemingway said, “The only kind of writing is rewriting.” When I come to rewrite, I usually approach it as another opportunity to exercise my creativity, to have fun with the process, and surprise myself with solutions to creative problems. In this way, I don’t get verklempt at the prospect of rewriting.

Many writers feel/fear that their relationship with editors has to be adversarial. It cannot be stressed enough that the editor is not your enemy. Quite the opposite. Editors and writers want the same thing: to publish the best version of a story as they can, albeit for slightly different reasons. The author wants to maintain their reputation, while the editor wants to maintain the reputation of the publication in which the story appears. If you ever have the misfortune to have a story published in a magazine or anthology that is not edited, the deficiencies you will subsequently find in it will be a lesson on why you really need an editor.

The Editor’s Contribution

Generally, editors will ask for two types of changes: those based on style or facts, and those based on creative interpretation. Most publications have an in-house style that they expect all stories to conform to (for instance, I think italics are overused in modern publishing, so the style of my publications is to give italics a break and use bold type for emphasis; be forewarned that I am also on a one-person crusade to bring back the interrobang). These are not debatable questions, so there is no point arguing with an editor about them.

In a similar vein, there is no point arguing if an editor suggests a writer change a factual error. For science fiction, for example, it’s important to get your science right. For all genres, dates of important historical events, the names of real people, actual geography (unless you have a reason for not using the actual facts), an editor is absolutely right to suggest that you do. No matter how obscure the fact, there will always be a reader who knows it and is taken out of the story if a writer gets it wrong.

Changes based on creative interpretation are more complicated. They may be something as simple as word choice: Does one word better convey the author’s intended meaning than another? Clarity is an important consideration: Does a sentence or paragraph convey the information it needs to in a way that will be clear to most readers? Issues of clarity may involve apparent continuity problems (if an object that is introduced as blue is referred to as red later in the story), including characters acting in ways that contradict what has already been established about them. Another issue may involve the order of scenes: Would a scene late in the story have more impact if it appeared earlier in the story?

This sort of editorial input is vital to creating the world of the story in the mind of the reader; it is often the most hotly contested by writers.

Working Together

My practice as an editor is to couch interpretive input as either a suggestion (“You might want to try…”) or a question (“This is unclear. Might it be better as…?”). If the writer makes a reasonable argument for why the change isn’t necessary, I’m usually willing to accept it (although it is also true that 90% or more of the changes I ask for are accepted by authors). I try to keep in mind that, in matters of artistic interpretation, there aren’t always clear-cut right or wrong answers. While my input makes sense to me given my understanding of how stories work, it is always possible that the writer is in a better position to judge what works for their specific story.

Until they have built the trust that comes with working together, it helps writers and editors to approach their relationship with a little humility. Authors need to respect the experience and knowledge the editor has; editors need to respect the fact that the inspiration and drive to write the story makes the author its de facto expert. This kind of mutual respect is the basis of successful creative relationships.

Ira Nayman writes humorous speculative fiction. He is the author of eight published novels and thirty-five published short stories. He was the editor of Amazing Stories magazine for three years. The Dance, his first anthology as editor, was published in 2024.

The post The Professional Editor/Writer Relationship appeared first on SFWA.

The Board of Directors of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) has released a statement on the freedom of expression for writers residing in conflict areas and poor living conditions:

As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in education, SFWA is restricted from political campaign intervention in particular forms. At the same time, our mission is to inform, support, promote, defend, and advocate for writers of science fiction, fantasy, and related ...Read More

Barry N. Malzberg (24 July 1939–19 December 2024), also writing as Mel Johnson, K.M. O’Donnell, Nathan Herbert, Mike Barry, Claudine Dumas, Lee W. Mason, and Gerrold Watkins, was a prolific and varied writer, anthologist, columnist, critic, satirist, and editor. Malzberg served as SFWA’s Eastern Regional Director from 1980 to 1984.

After originally working toward careers in screenwriting and as a literary agent, Malzberg began writing and publishing short fiction in the mid-1960s. His early publications, such as “The Sense of the Fire,” were in men’s magazines such as Escapade, where he was also an editor. Over the next three decades, he wrote many well-known and award-nominated short stories, later gathered into volumes of collected works, as well as dozens of novels across science-fiction, mystery, thriller, and erotica. His works were often notably pessimistic in tone, including his John W. Campbell Memorial Award winning book Beyond Apollo (1972), the third in a series of negative commentaries on the Apollo astronauts and program, and he was known for melding a bleak perspective on humanity with traps of existence as psychological elements through stories of science-fiction, erotica, and the two combined.

A prolific essayist, Malzberg’s collected non-fiction won the Locus Award twice and covered a broad range of current and historical topics. Malzberg was a notable contributor to the SFWA Bulletin: first, as the magazine’s editor in the late 1960s, until asked to resign after an essay negative to the NASA space program. Then, together with writer Mike Resnik, Malzberg contributed to The Resnick & Malzberg Dialogues, a regular advice column that ran in over fifty issues, ending famously with a discussion on women in editing, which sparked conversation that changed the course of the SFWA organization and influenced the broader genre community.

Author and editor Scott Edelman notes, “My first thoughts go not to his millions of written words—which I have loved and do not intend these memories to diminish—but to the moment when we first met, and I had the opportunity to face to face tell him how sorry I was for how I’d once wronged him. He waved it off and said something like—the world would be a terrible place if we were all judged by the worst thing we ever did. ‘Let it go,’ he said. And we went on to have a true friendship. I will always treasure his graciousness in that moment.”

Author Robert J. Sawyer says, “Barry N. Malzberg was a true mensch. He believed fervently in the power of science fiction and fought for it to transcend being a commercial category of mere escapism. The field has lost not only one of its greatest authors but also one of its fiercest champions. Barry’s published writings were often caustic, but whenever I needed a friend, he was always there with kindness and unflagging support.”

Author Nancy Kress remembers, “Barry Malzberg, my friend for over thirty years, was a mass of contradictions. A self-proclaimed pessimist (he thought of it as realism), he was a funny and entertaining raconteur. Holding a low opinion of humanity in the aggregate, he was kind, loyal, and generous to individuals. Believing he had fallen short of his own literary hopes for his writing, he nonetheless was justly proud of his best work and enormously pleased when his impressive oeuvre was brought back into print. I relished his company, and I will miss him.”

Barry N. Malzberg lived 85 years.

The post In Memoriam: Barry N. Malzberg appeared first on SFWA.

Author George Zebrowski, 78, died December 20, 2024.

Jerzy Tadeus Zebrowski (AKA George Thaddeus Zebrowski) was born December 28, 1945 in Villach, Austria. He moved to the US in 1951, and attended an early Clarion Writers’ Workshop in 1968.

Zebrowski’s first publications were collaborations with Jack Dann in 1970 (“Traps” and “Dark, Dark, the Dead Star”), and his first solo story was “The Water Sculptor of Station 233” (1970). He ...Read More

Can*Con 2024 was held November 1-3 in person at the Sheraton Hotel in Ottawa, Canada. Guests of honour were Jennifer Brozek, Sarah Gailey, Diana M. Pho, Waubgeshig Rice, and Arley Sorg. A separate virtual Can*Con was held on April 20 with roughly one hundred attendees.

There were 400 in-person registered attendees. Programming featured 115 panelists and 107 items on writing, literature, and more, such as ‘‘Post-Colonial Perspectives on the Post-Apocalypse’’ ...Read More

While many stories are born of conflict, sorrow, and tragedy, the act of storytelling requires some measure of peace. Writers must have homes, they must have food, and they must have the freedom to express themselves without fear.

In too many places around the world, writers do not know this peace.

We have members who live in, bear citizenship of, and travel to countries whose governments increasingly scrutinize personal speech and professional membership. Further, we have members and friends who are living and dying in conflicted areas and war zones. Their stories are powerful, they are many, and we must hear them.

As writers, our values shine forth in our writing; speculative fiction has a unique ability to undermine prejudices and upturn assumptions. We also have the power to challenge fascism and imagine better futures. Our voices reverberate around the world and throughout time, and we must use them.

As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in education, SFWA is restricted from political campaign intervention in particular forms. At the same time, our mission is to inform, support, promote, defend, and advocate for writers of science fiction, fantasy, and related genres.

We must not look away as our colleagues and readers—present and future—are killed, injured, or driven from their homes.

With that in mind, SFWA will continue to actively support speculative fiction writers under threat and in crisis.

Direct actions SFWA will take from this point forward include:

• SFWA will continue to provide Emergency Medical Fund and Legal Fund support to all qualifying authors, including those impacted authors in conflict zones.
• SFWA will provide free Virtual Nebula access for any author impacted by war or conflict.
• SFWA will waive membership fees for authors living in or displaced from areas impacted by war or conflict.

In addition, SFWA Givers Fund grants are available to:

• revitalize recovering science fiction and fantasy communities,
• fund writing scholarships targeted at affected authors,
• help to rebuild lost and destroyed SFF and related genre collections in affected libraries or educational institutions, and
• assist in the creation of safe writing spaces.

We are also here to support our community by pointing writers toward resources and opportunities they need. It is our mission to support writers, and we will not lose sight of those impacted by crises. If you or another writer need support, please contact crisis@sfwa.org.

Signed,

The SFWA Board of Directors

The post Statement from the SFWA Board: Writers in Crisis appeared first on SFWA.