…t was its own self, the vast, dark presence that seemed to fold the air around itself, wrapped around the contraption in the centre of the room that might have been a throne, that might have been a tree with too many thorns; metal, twisting and buckling like a fish caught on land, its shifting reflections hurting her eyes… “Welcome home, child,” a voice said, filling her ears to bursting. “Great-great-grandmother.” She forced herself to get the wo…

…emons, conniving high priests and generalised political plotting. Oh, and more ahuizotls, because fingernail-eating monsters always make everything better. Pre-order on Amazon.co.uk|Amazon.com|Barnes and Noble|Book Depository|Amazon.fr And while I’m at it, another (very nice) review of Servant of the Underworld at Cold Iron and Rowan-Wood….

…Dozois’s Year’s Best Science Fiction (the HM section is visible on amazon.com). Notably Rochita Loenen-Ruiz for her horror SF “59 Beads”, T.L. Morganfield for her alt-hist “The Happiest Place on Earth”, Sara Genge for her much-noted gender exploration “As Women Fight”, Juliette Wade for her first professional sale “Cold Words”, Stephanie Burgis for her quiet frontier fantasy “True Names”, J. Kathleen Cheney for her family Chinese fantasy “Early W…

Another of my January project has gone live at Tor.com: a roundtable on The Food of the Future, with Ann Leckie, Elizabeth Bear, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, and Fran Wilde. Check it out here. Thanks to everyone who took part–it was a lot of fun, and especially many many thanks to Fran Wilde for masterminding it and sending me pointed reminders about fixing and submitting it in what has been a rather overwhelming month (well, OK. L…

…Oxo angled measuring glass a couple years ago, and I haven’t looked back. Compared to my old measuring glass, it has three advantages. One is that the angle makes it much easier to see what you’re measuring from above as well as from the sides; the second is that it’s handily graduated in imperial and in metric (my old glass, like many French glasses, was by weight of what you were measuring, like flour or chocolate or sugar); the third is that t…

…d would still like it to be considered, please email me (slushmaster@gmail.com) and tell me the name of your story. It will save Shawna the trouble of reading a story that has since been withdrawn. It also wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to let me know you’re officially withdrawing your story or that you’ve already sold it elsewhere. So here’s where you come in, Internets. Blog about this. Tweet about this. Facebook about this. Help us ou…

…Just a heads-up on the website that the ebook edition has gone up on amazon. You can find it here: amazon.com|amazon.co.uk|amazon.fr. Meanwhile, am still jet lagged. Will go grab breakfast….

…Today, Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection, hits the store. Stories by Lavie Tidhar, Pat Cadigan, Brit Mandelo, Elizabeth Bear, Hannu Rajaniemi and more luminaries of the genre–and it also includes my Xuya continuity story “Ship’s Brother”, originally published in Interzone. Cover Buy now at Amazon.com|Amazon.co.uk|Book Depository….

Tor.com has revealed the cover of my upcoming book Fireheart Tiger, an f/f postcolonial The Goblin Emperor meets Howl’s Moving Castle. Look at it, isn’t it amazing? Cover art by Alyssa Winans Some small details you might not have noticed: the dragon on the pillar behind the woman (the flag of the country in the story is the dragon and pearl) the object catching fire in her hand is a teacup, referring to a story scene the guns in the lower right-h…

…Woke up to find out that Anne McCaffrey had died–I had never met her, but her work meant a lot to me when I was a teenager. At a time when most of the SF I read was male-dominated, it was good to know that girls could be dragon-riders and Harpers and have adventures just like the male protags. The world is going to be a little less without her in it….