Photo: Jill Roberts

On Twitter, ArmadilloCon Chair Person Jennifer Juday explains how they discovered GoH Deji Bryce Olukotun.

Carol Cooper for THE VILLAGE VOICE catches up with the next generation of science fiction writers.

Ever wonder where new science fiction writers come from? Typically, the best ones emerge from its readership. This would include video gamers and other genre media fans whose love for a broad spectrum of imaginative literature is both critical and obsessive. SF fandom (the initials here meaning “speculative fiction” to capture all flavors of fantasy and science fiction in one easy acronym) incubates its own future.

Fandom as a familial collective of readers and writers has existed since at least the 1920s, when lurid pulp fiction magazines encouraged Lovecraft’s quirky circle of acolytes to pen and critique their own tales of cosmic horror, scientific fantasy, or sword-and-sorcery epics. This path of transition from fan to pro is now made explicit for the curious by events like last month’s Nebula Conference, a four-day convention featuring panel discussions and an awards ceremony celebrating the most significant writing released during the previous year. This time held at the Pittsburgh Marriott hotel downtown, the Nebula Awards, given annually since 1965, are the Oscars of genre fiction, voted on by fellow writers, editors, publishers, and book agents.

Photo: Jill Roberts

Once indie fiction magazines were viable again, some magazine editors took the next evolutionary step to become publishers. Jacob Weisman discontinued his magazine in the mid-Nineties to form Tachyon Publications, which now publishes SFWA’s newly anointed “Grand Master” Peter S. Beagle, and released Bruce Sterling’s PIRATE UTOPIA in 2016. This month, Tachyon published THE FREEZE-FRAME REVOLUTION by Peter Watts, a former marine biologist who boldly inserts high-concept speculations about time and the future of humanity into a rigorously scientific space opera. In August, the giddily picaresque THE PEOPLES REPUBLIC OF EVERYTHING is due from Nick Mamatas, or — as China Miéville, himself a New York Times bestselling novelist, prefers to describe him — “The People’s Commissar of Awesome.”

For more info on INVADERS: 22 TALES FROM THE OUTER LIMITS OF LITERATURE, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Goro Fujita

Design by Elizabeth Story

For more info about THE NEW VOICES OF FANTASY, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Camille André

Cover design by Elizabeth Story