Interzone 246

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Interzone 246 will be published in the next couple of days. If you have a joint subscription then your copy will arrive with Black Static 34. Use the links for further details.

This issue’s Book Zone features the first of Jonathan McCalmont’s “Future Interrupted” columns, which will be a regular feature from now on. We also have reviews of the following books:

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes (reviewed and interviewed by Maureen Kincaid Speller)

The Best of all Possible Worlds by Karen Lord (reviewed by Jonathan McCalmont)

Adam Robots by Adam Roberts (reviewed by Paul Graham Raven)

The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination edited by John Joseph Adams (reviewed by Barbara Melville)

Wool by Hugh Howey (reviewed by Ian Sales)

Planesrunner by Ian McDonald (reviewed by Jack Deighton)

Judge Dredd: Day of Chaos; The Fourth Faction by John Wagner, Ben Willsher, Staz Johnson, Colin MacNeil and Henry Flint (reviewed by Ian Hunter)

Herald of the Storm by Richard Ford (reviewed by Peter Loftus)

The Explorer by James Smythe (reviewed by Matthew S. Dent)

Dangerous Gifts by Gaie Sebold (reviewed by Lawrence Osborn)

The Emperor of All Things by Paul Witcover (reviewed by Duncan Lunan)

Osiris by E.J. Swift (reviewed by Simon Marshall Jones)

There is a dedicated forum thread for this issue at Interaction.

Books Received

Recent arrivals.

Apocalypse by Dean Crawford

White Horse by Alex Adams

Among Others by Jo Walton

The Iron King by Maurice Druon

The Vorrh by B. Catling

The Rook by Daniel O’Malley

The Emperor of All Things by Paul Witcover

Doktor Glass by Thomas Brennan

The Apes of Wrath edited by Richard Klaw

The Betrayal of the Living by Nick Lake

Crandolin by Anna Tambour

Planesrunner by Ian McDonald

The Damned Don’t Die by Jim Nisbet

The Explorer by James Smythe

The Grim Company by Luke Scull

Dangerous Gifts by Gaie Sebold

The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination edited by John Joseph Adams

House of Secrets by Chris Columbus & Ned Vizzini

The Daylight War by Peter V. Brett

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

The Man From Primrose Lane by James Renner

The Demi-Monde: Summer by Rod Rees

Wool by Hugh Howey

A Conspiracy of Alchemists by Liesel Schwartz

The Mammoth Book of Unexplained Phenomena by Roy Bainton

The Twyning by Terence Blacker

Again, they’re mostly for Interzone but a few are intended for reviews in other venues. We won’t have the space to feature all of them but that doesn’t mean that they’re not worthwhile books. Sometimes I wonder if it would be physically possible for one person to keep up with reading all of them, even assuming that they did little else; it would be fun to try, though.

Check out the links for further details.

BSFA Awards 2011

The awards went to:

Novel: The Dervish House by Ian McDonald

Short Fiction: The Shipmaker by Aliette de Bodard (Interzone 231)

Art: Zoo City cover by Joey Hi-Fi

Non-Fiction: Blogging the Hugos: Decline by Paul Kincaid

Ian McDonald at BSFA

Tony Keen is interviewing Ian McDonald at the British Science Fiction Association’s monthly meeting on Wednesday 28th October. It’s free and open to non-members. Details here.

After this Ian will be flying out to Nantes where he will be appearing at Utopiales with the GSFWC‘s very own Hal Duncan next weekend.

Vector 259

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Vector 259 has been published this week and it features a summation of science fiction in 2008. Its reviewers (including me, you won’t be surprised to read) have written about their five favourite books, from which Kari Sperring has produced a poll. Congatulations to the winners – but you’re going to have to buy a copy to find out who they are. There are also round-ups of film and television in 2008, Stephen Baxter’s column, articles from Andy Sawyer and Graham Sleight, an interview with Bryan Talbot, and piles of reviews. It costs £4 and is available from the British Science Fiction Association.

But wait! There’s more. If you join the BSFA, you’ll also get a Focus fiction special in this mailing. It’s got the winner and runner-ups from the BSFA short story contest, so it contains stories from Roderick Gladwish, Nina Allan, James Bloomer, Nigel Envarli Crowe, Gary Spencer, and Andrew West.

But wait! There is also a ballot paper for the annual BSFA awards, and it is inside an anthology of the stories short-listed for the Best Short Fiction Award. You’ll get to read the Greg Egan and Paul McAuley stories that were first published in Interzone, as well as the stories by Ted Chiang and M. Rickert. The five pieces of artwork on the Best Artwork shortlist are also reproduced.

But wait! There’s still more! This mailing also comes with a special BSFA members sampler edition of Postscripts which reprints some of the fiction that has appeared in it over the last few years. You’ll get stories from Stephen Baxter, Ray Bradbury, Ramsey Campbell, Peter Hamilton, Joe Hill, Stephen King, Paul McAuley, Lisa Tuttle, Gene Wolfe, and Al Robertson.

How many short stories is that altogether? I’ve lost count.

The Best of Best New SF

…or The Mammoth Book of The Best of Best New SF, if you’re standing on Albion’s fair shore. There is an elegiac touch about this anthology of Gardner Dozois’s anthology series, but let’s hope there are plenty more to come. 

However, how on earth do you go about selecting an average of two stories from each of The Year’s Best New Science Fiction?  Selecting the contents for the regular volume must be hard enough.  I mean, you can only allow yourself one Robert Reed story. Adding the fact that Dozois was the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction for much of that time merely compounds the problem.  Presumably he liked, at the very least, every story that he bought for the magazine.

Anyway, it’s nice to see that an Interzone story made it in.  It’s Ian McDonald’s Recording Angel from Interzone 104.