…for the suggestions! And any other recs in the same vein are very much welcome (especially more non-US and non-UK works). Also, if you’re one of the people who gave me recommendations: I was at work or sleeping for a significant portion of the discussion, and twitter sucks at threading discussions over several hours, so it’s entirely possible that I didn’t manage to write your recs down. Feel free to ping me again if you think I’ve passed you ove…

…Delighted that “The Dust Queen” (published in Jonathan Strahan’s Reach for Infinity), and “Memorials” (published in Asimov’s Science Fiction) are both Locus Awards finalists, respectively in Best Short Story and Best Novelette. Complete list of finalists here; there’s some very very cool people on there and it’s going to be tough competition 🙂…

…y. Chockful of detail, with a strong voice reminiscent of the best magical realists. Track it online and read it, you won’t regret it. Plus, it has an awesome illustration. Novella: -“The Man Who Ended History: a Documentary”, Ken Liu (available online here at Ken’s website, originally published in Panverse Three). Ken had a lot of very good stories this year, but this one is my favourite (narrow tie between this and “Paper Menagerie in F&SF, thou…

…world for another; the wonders of space and faraway history where magic is real–where a farmboy can rise to become king; where ordinary people can stop evil in its track; and where science is a force for good, and the future has everyone equal without questions of creed and race. There are a few… wrong notes, though. I cannot help but notice that Tolkien’s heroes are basically Europeans; and that the Easterlings–yellow-skinned or swarthy–seem to b…

In possibly the fastest turnaround I’ve had from finishing the final draft to publication, you can now read my story “Scattered Along the River of Heaven” in Clarkesworld. Or, if audio fiction is more to your liking, you can listen to the podcast by the awesome Kate Baker. This is the pseudo-Asian SF story with bots, a dying colonial empire, and a prison orbiting a black hole–aka the one where I had to improvise four pseudo-Chinese poems before I…

…It’s the tropes that I’ve seen over and over in media, the easy answers to complex questions; the archetypes of behaviour that feel so weighty because they’ve been reinforced by years of societal pressure (the encyclopedias in several volumes that insist that women really like pink and shopping and don’t have a brain, that real men don’t cry, etc.). Which means that I’m very, very wary of the cliché shelf: I have a habit of second-guessing the fir…

…xtra atmosphere and mood they brought to the whole endeavour. You can also search flickr for Creative Commons pictures (they have something called The Commons now, which has nice pictures from public archives). I used flickr for my website and was very happy with it; but my trailer needs were adequately covered by istockphoto and Getty, and so I never came back to it. Be careful with licenses: most pictures require attribution, and some pictures o…

…the other threads exist at all, other than for structural reasons, is because they feature other characters, far more sympathetic than Eymerich; he’s the kind of character you don’t really want to be with for long). Part of a very successful series in Europe, but I’m not really sure I can stomach another one of those….

…Country”); I’ve also reordered stuff on my website to put stories directly online (the Packet ones, and two extras, in addition to the stuff I’ve published in online zines). I’m still looking for a way to list subpages within a post (I’ve found the wordpress syntax, but it seems to be working only in the sidebar). I also have an author page up on Facebook, mostly following the example of Gareth. I suppose every little bit helps 🙂 And, as said abov…

…out to be key in defeating the Lord Ruler at the end of book 1). History becomes a search for truth, to part layers of obfuscation (sometimes merely lost to time, sometimes to active malice: the origin of the eponymous Game of Fives in Kate Elliott’s Court of Fives, crucial to navigating the underground of the city, has been deliberately obscured by the rulers of the country). Myth and history take on a literal, pressing meaning–it can kill you if…