Today is the release day for fellow Angry Roboter Colin Harvey‘s Winter Song:

The planet had fallen off the map.
When Karl Allman’s spaceship crashed, he had only one question:
“HOW DO I GET OUT OF HERE?”
Rock-hard SF adventure. No one here gets out alive.
FILE UNDER: Science Fiction [Starship Crash / Abandoned Colonists / Alien Slaughter / Hell Planet]

I haven’t read it yet (will order it with next month’s amazon budget), but I had the good fortune to read a draft of Colin’s next book, Damage Time (also coming from Angry Robot), and I can tell you that Colin excels at dark, atmospheric world building, as well as the handling of a strong, diverse cast in unusual situations. Go check it out! (or, failing that, go congratulate him here🙂 )

Over at the Super-Sekrit Clubhouse, Marshall Payne interviews Vylar Kaftan, about writing, life in California, and her short story “Break the Vessel”:
Interview with Vylar Kaftan

The easiest part [of crafting a story] is characters. They just appear on the page and flesh themselves out like magic. Possibly because I’ve been people-watching forever. The hardest part is letting go of my own ridiculously high standards and accepting that things are always, always lost in translation from imagination to words—and that’s just the nature of the beast.

(and while you’re at it, check out the rest of the Super-Sekrit clubhouse: fun cartoons, birthday posts, and more neat interviews)

Fellow Angry Robot author and Apex Book of World SF Lavie Tidhar gets interviewed over at SF Signal on World SF. Fascinating stuff: go check it out.
Interview with Lavie Tidhar about World SF

To me, [World SF] is first of all the kind of SF written in languages other than English, but that doesn’t take into account that small – but visible! – part of writers choosing to work in English despite it being their second – or even third! – language. And then, English has become such a universal language that in many places it has acquired its own regional flavor – take India or Malaysia or South Africa. And then, what about writers from one background living in another? Is Nnedi Okorafor an American writer or a Nigerian writer? Identities today can easily have two or three layers.

(in related shameless promotion offers, you can preorder the Apex Book of World SF here and get Lavie’s super collection HebrewPunk for only $10.00, in addition to my story “The Lost Xuyan Bride” and lots of cool-sounding contributions in the book per se)

• Currently looking at the page proofs for my story “The Wind-Blown Man”, forthcoming in Asimov’s. It looks like a real story…
• Apparently, you can now pre-order Servant of the Underworld on Amazon.co.uk… Aaand I would seem to have acquired an author page at Angry Robot, and a book page, courtesy of the AR crew…

Tis weird, but tis shiny shiny…

Got the news from Beth Wodzinski when I was in the Internet Black Hole that is Spain: my story “Within the City of the Swan”, first published in the Art Issue of Shimmer, is on the Recommended Reading List for the Best American Fantasy, vol 3.

It’s not a lengthy list, either. And it includes one other story from Shimmer, MK Hobson’s “The Hand of the Devil on a String” in issue 9, in addition to Kuzhali Manickavel’s “Flying and Falling”, also from the Art Issue, which is in the actual TOC of the book.

Wow. Go Shimmer!

To celebrate, Shimmer is having a promotion of $3 off the cover price of both issues: you can have a PDF copy of the Art Issue or of Issue 9 for only $1!