Sam J. Miller’s books have been called “must reads” and “bests of the year” by USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, and O: The Oprah Magazine, among others. His works have won the Shirley Jackson Award, Andre Norton Award for Best Young Adult Novel. and John W. Campbell Memorial Award and nominated for the Nebula Award, World Fantasy Award, Crawford Award, Locus Award, Theodore Sturgeon Award, John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Premio Italia, the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, and the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book. Miller’s novels include The Art of Starving (2017; Andre Norton Award winner), Blackfish City (2018; John W. Campbell Memorial Award winner), Destroy All Monsters (2019), and The Blade Between (2020).
Beginning with “Haunting Your House” (2008), he has produced numerous acclaimed and award-winning short stories including “57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides” (2013; Shirley Jackson Award winner), “We Are the Cloud” (2014; nominated for both Nebula and Sturgeon); “The Heat of Us: Notes Toward an Oral History” (2015; nominated for World Fantasy), “When Your Child Strays from God” (2015; nominated for Nebula), “Angel, Monster, Man” (2016; nominated for Shirley Jackson), and “Things with Beards” (2016; nominated for Sturgeon, Nebula, and Shirley Jackson). Miller’s first short story collection BOYS, BEASTS & MEN (2022) won the Locus Award. Among his other books are the chapbooks The Future of Hunger in the Age of Programmable Matter (2017), Let All the Children Boogie (2021), and Kid Wolf and Kraken Boy (2022), as well as the anthology Horror After 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror (2001 co-edited with Aviva Briefel).
A graduate of the 2012 Clarion’s Workshop and a member of the SFF writers group Altered Fluid, Miller’s fiction has been translated into Croatian, Czech, French, Hebrew, Italian, Hungarian, Japanese, Mandarin, Polish, and Russian. He spent fifteen years as a community organizer for Picture the Homeless.
All of us a Tachyon wish the sensational Sam, a happy birthday.
BITTER MEDICINE by Mia Tsai
“The magic system had me mesmerized in how it blends cultures. Inspired by Chinese drama, the romance & action were addictive”
This novella is a prequel to Kornher-Stace’s 2021’s Firebreak. In the spirit of “the dog doesn’t die,” since older versions of 06 and 22 appear in Firebreak and other works, it is unlikely either will die in this prequel. It seems odd that I would encounter two 2023 SF novels about workers being brutally exploited by ruthless corporations. What possible reason could there be for SF authors to focus on this subject in particular at this specific moment in time? This must be just one of those odd coincidences one sees from time to time in SF…
Umm… I just read Atoms Never Touch by micha cárdenas, which I highly recommend. Also recently: OK Psyche by Anya Johanna DeNiro, All the Hometowns You Can’t Stay Away From by Izzy Wasserstein, UNITY by Elly Bangs, and Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki, off the top of my head. I also urge everyone to hunt down books by April Daniels, Roz Kaveney, and Rachel Pollack. Oh, and here’s a list I did a while back in my newsletter.
Sometime in 1989, Terry Bisson was driving his daughter to college in upstate New York when an idea for a short story came to him. Glancing toward the highway median, he had a vision: animals sitting together, in their own world, talking to one other. The vision became a title: “Bears Discover Fire.”
Fictioneer, poet, editrix, and critic Jaymee Goh ran away from academia to fall into publishing as an editor at Tachyon. As the spearhead behind the Debut Authors series, she edited R. B. Lemberg’s Nebula and World Fantasy Award finalist THE FOUR PROFOUND WEAVES (2020), Kimberly Unger’s NUCLEATION (2020), Elly Bangs’ UNITY (2021), and the World Fantasy finalists World Fantasy Award finalists THE BRUISING OF QILWA (2022) by Naseem Jaminia and BOYS, BEASTS & MEN (2022) by Sam J. Miller. Among the other acclaimed Tachyon titles that Goh oversaw were Mia Tsai’s first novel BITTER MEDICINE (2023), R. B. Lemberg’s first Birdverse novel THE UNBALANCING (2022), Kimberly Unger’s Philip K. Dick Award winner THE EXTRACTIONIST (2022), New York Times bestselling author Marjorie Liu’s collection THE TANGLEROOT PALACE (2021), and David Ebenbach’s first science fiction novel HOW TO MARS (2021).
Beyond her duties with Tachyon, Goh has edited the anthologies The Omnibus of Doctor Bill Shakes and the Magnificent Ionic Pentatetrameter: A Steampunk’s Shakespeare Anthology (2012 with Matt Delman), The Sea is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia (2015 with Joyce Chng), and The WisCon Chronicles Vol. 11: Trials by Whiteness (2017).
Her numerous acclaimed works of short fiction and critical essays have appeared in Lightspeed, Interfictions, Strange Horizons, STEAMPUNK III: STEAMPUNK REVOLUTION, Tor.com, New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, New Suns 2: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, Recognize Fascism, Project Future Malaysia, Curious Fictions, Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers, and many others. Her short story “The Last Cheng Beng Gift” (Lightspeed September 2017) appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 and was read by Levar Burton on Levar Burton Reads. Her contribution to New Suns “The Freedom of the Shifting Sea” was reprinted in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020.
In 2017, Goh finished her PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside with the dissertation, Shades of Sepia: Examining Eurocentrism and Whiteness in Relation to Multiculturalism in Steampunk Iconograpy, Fandom, and Culture Industry.
Happy birthday to the amazing Jaymee. May you enjoy all the fancy chocolates you can devour
NOVEL
NOVELLA
SHORT FICTION
ANTHOLOGY
COLLECTION
ARTIST
SPECIAL AWARD – PROFESSIONAL
SPECIAL AWARD – NON-PROFESSIONAL
Eriophora’s human crew are infrequently needed, occasionally woken from cold-sleep to deal with problems beyond the limited (but reliable) intelligence of the ship’s AI. Chafing at their endless servitude, human minds turn to escape. But how can people who wake one week out of every thousand years outwit a relentless master with all the time in the world to methodically monitor its human servants?
Ah, good old Peter Watts, about whom I once observed “Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts.” However, this story isn’t as bleak as many other Watts stories.
If Shai can succeed, there is no doubt that THE EMPEROR’S SOUL will be her masterwork. Just like the novella itself is a masterful tale.
Because this is for Pride, we looked for books that depicted queerness in all its aspects. You’ll find profoundly hopeful work as well as darker themes, but what you won’t find is stories in which being queer means you’re evil, nor any in which it’s a purely doomed and tragic fate. Instead, these are stories that showcase the myriad ways that queerness manifests — the many ways that we have chosen to be.
We don’t — can’t — claim that this is anything like a definitive LGBTQIA+ collection. There’s too much wonderful queer writing out there for anyone to be able to claim that. We’re offering a mix of novels, novellas, and short story collections; we have science fiction, space opera, fantasy, dark fantasy, historical fantasy, and more. We’ve included newer writers and new work, and reintroduced some older stories you may have missed the first time around. In short, we have a bundle that celebrates our many identities and shows off the work of some of the best writers working today.
StoryBundle has always allowed its patrons to donate part of their payment to a related charity, and once again we’re supporting Rainbow Railroad, an NGO helping LGBTQ+ people escape state-sponsored persecution and violence worldwide. Their work is desperately needed, now more than ever, and if you choose, you can designate a portion of the bundle’s price to them at no extra cost to you— a gift that can help save a life. Thank you for joining us to help celebrate Pride and queer voices!
Melissa Scott and Catherine Lundoff, Pride Bundle curators
The Locus Awards winners will be announced June 24, 2023, during the in-person Locus Awards Ceremony, held in the historic Nile Hall at Preservation Park in downtown Oakland, California. Join Maggie Tokuda-Hall, our MC for the awards ceremony, and special guest Connie Willis for an entertaining presentation of the awards, plus program items and a catered reception. Additional virtual events include author readings, panels with leading authors, and more. Buy your ticket today!
2023 Locus Awards Top Ten Finalists
SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL
FANTASY NOVEL
HORROR NOVEL
YOUNG ADULT NOVEL
FIRST NOVEL
NOVELLA
NOVELETTE
SHORT STORY
ANTHOLOGY
COLLECTION
MAGAZINE
PUBLISHER
EDITOR
ARTIST
NON-FICTION
ILLUSTRATED AND ART BOOK
There are always great single-author collections every year. Probably (I have a nagging feeling I am forgetting something) my three favorites were Breakable Things (Undertow) by the ever-unsettling Cassandra Khaw BOYS, BEASTS & MEN by Sam J. Miller, who has a knack for striking deep into both a reader’s heart and gut, and the richly imaginative (and often dark) Our Fruiting Bodies: Short Fiction by the legendary Nisi Shawl (Aqueduct).
Paula Guran
Both Sam J. Miller (with BOYS, BEASTS & MEN) and R.B. Lemberg (with Geometries of Belonging) came out with collections that capture for me a lot of what hooked me on short speculative fiction. These were the two authors who, upon discovering their work, changed the way I viewed reading, showing me what I had been missing and what I was most hungry for. Their collections are treasures, gems that shine brightly even among the hordes of works released this year.
Charles Payseur
THE EMPEROR’S SOUL is brilliant at exploring the nature of art and how society often overlooks art that doesn’t fit into the confines of a certain dominant worldview which is refreshing. As a novella, you can see why it won the Hugo Award in 2013, although there are places that are itching to be expanded upon in a way that a sequel wouldn’t necessarily be able to accomplish. 8/10.
HOW TO MARS is an out-of-this-world human migration story that’s wonderfully weird, stylistically creative, darkly funny and unexpectedly moving.
Irreverent, poignant, and perfectly weird, David Ebenbach’s debut science-fiction outing, like a mission to Mars, is an incredible trip you will never forget.
This is a wonderful collection of short stories, and Nalo Hopkinson kept me reading stories that were just straight up horror that I would ordinarily just skip right over. Along with the horror, there’s dark fantasy, lighter, happier fantasy, and even a couple of stories that can fairly be called science fiction. There’s a reworking of the story of Caliban, and a new Bordertown story. It’s an impressive range.
Lanternfish Press is pleased to announce the acquisition of The Afterlife of Frankenstein: A Century of Mad Science, Automata, and Monsters Inspired by Mary Shelley, 1818-1918, edited by David Sandner, for publication in Fall 2023.
Dr. Frankenstein’s monster is one of the most iconic figures in English literature, popularized through decades of writing, film, and comedy. But even before the invention of film, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein profoundly impacted scores of writers, gathering force for the genre that would ultimately become what we know as science fiction.
In this anthology, scholar of the fantastic David Sandner explores the first hundred years of Frankenstein’s influence. This collection of short stories and excerpts from work published between 1818 to 1918 demonstrates what a pioneering myth Frankenstein has always been—from the very day when lightning first struck and it opened its eyes on the world.
Other Tachyon authors and editors receiving notice include Charlie Jane Anders, Ellen Datlow, Daryl Gregory, Eileen Gunn, John Kessel, Marjorie Liu, and Alastair Reynolds.
Congrats to all.
Choose your favorites by voting in the 2022 Poll & Survey. The Poll decides the winners of the Locus Awards, presented in June 2023 at the Locus Awards Weekend, and is open to all.
