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T A B L E o f C O N T E N T S
Drowning in a Sea of 2011 Books
February 2012 • Issue 613 • Vol. 68 • No. 2
45th Year of Publication • 29-Time Hugo Winner
Cover and Interview Design by Francesca Myman
I N T E R V I E W
Joe Haldeman: Art & Science / 6
P E O P L E & P U B L I S H I N G / 8
Notes on milestones, awards, books sold, etc., with news this issue about Connie Willis, George
R.R. Martin, Joe R. Lansdale, Rick Hautala, Gene Wolfe, Jack McDevitt, Patrick Rothfuss
& Nate Taylor, S.M. Stirling, Betsy Mitchell, China Miéville, and many others
M a I N S T O R I E S / 10
Supreme Court Rules on Copyright Case • 2011 Dick Award Finalists • Artists on SOPA/PIPA
• World Fantasy Judges Announced
T H E D a T a F I L E / 11
Borders Bankruptcy Winding Down • B&N to Sell Sterling • Agency Model Antitrust News •
Open Road Lawsuit • UK Bestsellers of 2011 • Announcements • Worldcons News • Online
News • Magazine News • Book News • Legal News • Awards News • 2011 Stoker Preliminary
Ballot • Financial News • International Rights • Audio Rights • Other Rights • Audiobooks
Received • Publications Received • Catalogs Received
2 0 1 1 : T H E Y E a R I N R E V I E W
2011: Recommended Reading: Liza Groen Trombi, Francesca Myman, Heather Shaw, Chloe
Smith, Gary K. Wolfe, Faren Miller, Jonathan Strahan, Russell Letson, Graham Sleight, Paul
Witcover, Adrienne Martini, Carolyn Cushman, Gardner Dozois, Rich Horton / 34 2011
Recommended Reading List / 42 2011 Book Summary / 52 2011 Magazine Summary / 56
L I S T I N G S
Magazines Received: December / 60 Books Received: December / 61 British Books Received:
November / 71 Bestsellers / 72
O B I T U a R I E S / 80
James L. ‘‘Rusty’’ Hevelin • Appreciations by Joe Haldeman and Gary K. Wolfe • Howard
Hopkins • Robert E. Briney • Glenn Lord • Richard Bessière • Louis Thirion
L O C U S L E T T E R S / 81
Jonathan Strahan • Ellen Datlow
E D I T O R I a L M a T T E R S / 82
A Look Back • This Issue • Locus Awards • Rusty Hevelin • Next Issue
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� L O C U S L O O k S A T B O O k S �
Gardnerspace: a Short Fiction Column by Gardner Dozois / 14
The Book of Cthulhu, Ross E. Lockhart, ed.; New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird, Paula Guran, ed.; Sense of
Wonder: a Century of Science Fiction, Leigh Ronald Grossman, ed.; Clarkesworld 11/11; Tor. com 12/13/11;
Tor. com 12/14/11.
Short Fiction Reviews by Rich Horton / 15
Redstone 10/11; Redstone 12/11; Beneath Ceaseless Skies 12/15/11; Apex 11/11; Abyss & Apex 4th Quarter 2011;
Strange Horizons 10/11; Clarkesworld 11/11; Clarkesworld 1/12; Lightspeed 12/11; Asimov’s 2/12; Analog 3/12;
Conjunctions 57; a Book of Horrors, Stephen Jones; Eastercon Souvenir Book 2011.
Reviews by Gary K. Wolfe / 16
Hide Me among the Graves, Tim Powers; The Games, Ted Kosmatka; Distrust That Particular Flavor, William
Gibson.
Reviews by Faren Miller / 18
The Courier’s New Bicycle, Kim Westwood; Everything Is Broken, John Shirley; The Folded World, Catherynne
M. Valente; The Emperor’s Knife, Mazarkis Williams; Somewhere Beneath Those Waves, Sarah Monette.
Reviews by Russell Letson / 21
The Other, Matthew Hughes; The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow, Cory Doctorow.
Reviews by adrienne Martini / 23
The Highest Frontier, Joan Slonzewski; Seed, Rob Ziegler; The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten, Harrison
Geillor; Cinder, Marissa Meyer; The Best of Kage Baker, Kage Baker.
Reviews by Stefen Dziemianowicz / 25
The Doll: The Lost Short Stories, Daphne du Maurier; The Hunter from the Woods, Robert R. McCammon;
Shadows West, Joe R. Lansdale & John R. Lansdale.
Reviews by Carolyn Cushman / 27
The Mostly True Story of Jack, Kelly Barnhill; The Daemon Prism, Carol Berg; Liar’s Moon, Elizabeth C.
Bunce; Blood of Eden, Tami Dane; Tricks of the Trade, Laura Anne Gilman; alien Proliferation, Gini Koch;
Beauty and the Werewolf, Mercedes Lackey; Switchblade Goddess, Lucy A. Snyder; Touch of Power, Maria
V. Snyder; The Space Between, Brenna Yovanoff.
Reviews by Divers Hands: Richard a. Lupoff, Tim Pratt, and Gwenda Bond / 28
Chariots of San Fernando and Other Stories: The Best of Malcolm Jameson: Volume 1, Malcolm Jameson;
The Mirage, Matt Ruff; a Monster Calls, Patrick Ness; abarat: absolulte Midnight, Clive Barker.
Yesterday’s Tomorrows by Graham Sleight / 31
Nova, Samuel R. Delany; aye, and Gomorrah, Samuel R. Delany; Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany.
Locus Looks at art Books by Karen Haber and Francesca Myman / 33
a Tolkien Tapestry: Pictures to accompany The Lord of the Rings, Cor Blok; Hardware: The Definitive SF
Works of Chris Foss, Chris Foss; Out of this World: Science Fiction But Not as You Know It, Mike Ashley,
ed.; SHORT TAKES: Fantasy+ 3: Best Hand-Painted Illustrations, Vincent Zhao, ed.; Exposé 9, Daniel Wade,
ed.; Masters of Science Fiction and Fantasy art, Karen Haber; SHORT TAKE: The Digital Matte Painting
Handbook, David Mattingly.
Terry Bisson: This Month in History / 15, 17, 19, 23
In Stefan Dziemianowicz’s review of On Conan
Doyle by Michael Dirda (Locus #612, January 2012),
Joe Haldeman ......................(LT)1
2011 Books ........................(FM)3
Tim Powers ........................(FM)5
Ted Kosmatka..................(F/CK)5
Matthew Hughes ................... (F)5
Joan Slonczewski ...........(F/MR)5
Connie Willlis ....................(FM)8
Joe R. Lansdale ..................(BG)8
Rick Hautala .......................... (F)8
Gene Wolfe .........................(BG)8
Dame Penelope Lively .......... (F)8
Maggie Gee ........................... (F)8
Mike Glyer .........................(BG)8
Susan Ann Protter ................. (F)9
China Miéville ....................(CS)9
Samuel R. Delany ............... (F)31
Liza Groen Trombi ...........(FM)34
Gary K. Wolfe ...............(F/BC)38
Faren Miller ........................ (F)39
Jonathan Strahan ...............(LT)40
C O R R E C T I O N S TO L O C U S
P H O T O L I S T I N G
Russell Letson ..................(AB)45
Graham Sleight ................(AB)46
Paul Witcover ....................(LT)47
Adrienne Martini ................. (F)48
Carolyn Cushman .............(FM)48
Gardner Dozois .................(EL)49
Rich Horton ......................... (F)50
Rusty Hevelin ...................(BG)80
Rusty Hevelin,
Gay Haldeman ................. (JJ)80
Damon Knight,
Rusty Hevelin ................(GH)80
Gary K. Wolfe, Rusty Hevelin,
Gay Haldeman ................(LT)80
Glenn Lord .................... (F/PA)81
Photo Listing: (LT) Liza Groen
Trombi, (FM) Francesca Myman,
(F/CK) Christine Kosmatka, (F/
MR) Michael Reilly, (BG) Beth
we listed the publication date as October 2012. The
book came out in October 2011.�
Gwinn, (CS) Cat Sparks, (F/BC)
Bill Clemente, (AB) Amelia Beamer,
(EL) Ernest Lilley, (JJ) Jane Jewell,
(GH) Gay Haldeman, (F/PA) Paul
Allen, (F) Furnished.�
a D I N D E x
Ace/Roc ............................... 12,13
Baen .................................... 22,79
Brillance Audio ........................... 4
Clarion ....................................... 67
Clarion West .............................. 69
Deep Into the Heart
of a Rose ................................ 84
Harper Voyager ......................... 83
Locus ................................... 51,82
Orbit ............................................ 2
Titan .......................................... 24
Tor .................................. 20,26,30
Tim Powers
(2011)
Ted Kosmatka
(2010)
Matthew
Hughes (2007)
Joan Slonczewski
(2011)
p. 16
p. 16
p. 21
p. 23
In February’s Locus Online (), Jeff VanderMeer provides
his annual top-10 list of best SF/F
books of 2011.
Be sure to check out Locus Online’s
ongoing Roundtable blog, edited by
Karen Burnham; January featured several
discussions of “Intersectionality”.
In February, Locus Online begins occasional
reviews by Paul Di Filippo, of
books you probably won’t see reviewed
in Locus Magazine, starting with Ben
Marcus’ The Flame Alphabet. also
check-out Lois Tilden’s tri-monthly
short fiction reviews.
Plus: weekly listings of new books,
magazines (print and online) and websites,
and bestsellers, and regular posts
of breaking news.

Joe William Haldeman was born June 9, 1943 in Oklahoma City OK.
He married Mary Gay Potter in 1965, and earned a BS in physics and
astronomy from the University of Maryland in 1967. From 1967-69,
he served as a combat engineer in the US Army in Vietnam, where he
was seriously wounded and won a Purple Heart. He returned to college,
attending graduate school at the University of Iowa from 1969-70, and
got his MFA in 1975. He has been mostly a freelance writer since 1970,
though since 1983 he has also taught writing classes at MIT.
Haldeman’s first SF story was ‘‘Out of Phase’’ in Galaxy (1969),
while his story ‘‘Hero’’ (Analog, 1972) was one of the first in the genre
inspired by the Vietnam War, and was a Hugo Award finalist. Novella
‘‘The Hemingway Hoax’’ (1990) won both the Hugo and the Nebula
Award; a novel-length version appeared that same year. Other notable
stories include Hugo winners ‘‘Tricentennial’’ (1970) and ‘‘None So
Blind’’ (1994), Nebula Award finalist ‘‘More than the Sum of His Parts’’
(1985), World Fantasy Award Winner ‘‘Graves’’ (1992), and Hugo finalist
‘‘Four Short Novels’’ (2003).
Haldeman’s first published book was the autobiographical War Year
(1972), about Vietnam. His debut SF novel, now-classic The Forever
War (1975), won Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Awards. A thematic sequel,
Forever Peace (1997), also won Hugo and Nebula Awards, and was
followed by an actual sequel, Forever Free (1999). His other SF novels
include All My Sins Remembered (1977), Mindbridge (1977), the Worlds
trilogy (Worlds, 1981; Worlds Apart, 1985; and Worlds Enough and
Time, 1992), There Is No Darkness (1983, with his brother Jack C.
Haldeman III), Tool of the Trade (1987), Buying Time (1989; in the UK
as The Long Habit of Living), The Coming (2000), Guardian (2002),
Tiptree and Nebula Award winner Camouflage (2004), Old Twentieth
(2005), and The Accidental Time Machine (2007). His most recent
work is the Marsbound trilogy: Marsbound (2008), Starbound (2010),
and Earthbound (2011).
His short fiction has been collected in Infinite Dreams (1978), Dealing
in Futures (1985), Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds (1993), None So
Blind (1995), and A Separate War and Other Stories (2006).
Haldeman has also written mainstream novel 1968 (1994), a pair of
Star Trek novels, and two novels in the ’70s under house name Robert
Graham. An accomplished poet, Haldeman has won three Rhysling
Awards for best SF poetry, and his poems often appear in his story collections.
Saul’s Death & Other Poems (1997) was exclusively poetry.
He has also edited anthologies, including Cosmic Laughter (1974),
Nebula Award Stories Seventeen (1983), Body Armor: 2000 (1986,
with Martin H. Greenberg & Charles G. Waugh), Space-Fighters (1988,
with Greenberg & Waugh), and Future Weapons of War (2007, with
Greenberg). Haldeman also paints watercolors and writes songs.
In 2010, Haldeman was named a SF Grand Master by SFWA. He has
also received a Heinlein Award for life achievement (2009). He lives
part of the year in Gainesville FL and part in Cambridge MA.
•
6 / LOCUS February 2012
‘‘Since the late ’60s and ’70s, science fiction has undergone almost
total liberation. Of course, you have a negative-feedback thing where
you don’t dare be too conservative about sexual matters. I’m very lucky,
because my own zeitgeist was aligned in the right direction for this slow
revolution. It was slow in science fiction. It wasn’t a sudden, ‘Oh my God,
Philip José Farmer, and now we are all free to write anything we want!’
When Farmer published ‘The Lovers’, everybody said, ‘Phil, are you out
of your mind?’ Phil Farmer sort of made a career of thumbing his nose
at everybody’s sexual fears.
‘‘Most of Heinlein’s novels, all the way up to Stranger in a Strange
Land, could be published as YA now, or sent back with the request,
‘Could you spice things up a little?’ And as for current YA.... If you are a
regular publisher, not a science fiction publisher, I think you could come
up with a list of things that used to spell ‘young-adult novel.’ I’ve looked
at young-adult novels now, and they’re about anal rape, counterfeiting,
doing hard time for murder, things like that. It really isn’t like putting on
a frock and going to the dance anymore.
‘‘Looking at science fiction in the years from 1950 to 1965, the change
was gradual. By the time we changed, mainstream literature was already
there. The readership has changed, perhaps even more than the writers
have. Even at the height of the pulp magazine era, there was good artistic
science fiction being written. I haven’t read Stapledon’s Last and First
Men in about 30 years, but I remember thinking it was quite advanced
in that regard. But there was no real financial reward for it at the time.
‘‘A writer shouldn’t analyze his own career, but it’s pretty obvious that
I have a foot in each camp. Since The Forever War, I’ve been sort of the
hard science fiction writer who has a solid literary background. At the
time, there were not too many of us.
‘‘I have a theory about my getting a Tiptree Award for Camouflage,
and it’s the same reason The Forever War got a Nebula and a Hugo. The
Forever War was being considered for awards at the same time as Joanna
Russ’s The Female Man and Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren. Now if either
had come out without the other one, it probably would have won at least
the Nebula, but they took votes away from each other. I got the people
who said, ‘Here’s a new writer who’s artistic and all, but not political or
academic –’ or whatever you want to say. Camouflage was a similar thing:
they wanted a novel that was about gender issues, but one that was not
feminist. To my mind, Camouflage is just a science fiction novel that’s
partly about gender, and it goes at it in a very science-fictional way – not
political at all. And maybe that’s what they were looking for.
‘‘1968 is a mainstream novel written by a science fiction writer, and
that’s why it absolutely died. The publisher paid a large advance for it, but
they didn’t give it a nickel of promotion. They were honest enough to tell
me, ‘We don’t know what to do with this book, because it’s neither fish
nor fowl. It’s by a famous science fiction writer, but nobody who reads
this kind of novel will ever have heard of him. So why don’t we just spend
nothing on promoting this book, and see what happens?’ (At least, the
French translation did well.)

‘‘With Earthbound, I completed the Marsbound trilogy. The whole
thing started out with a request to do a young-adult novella. The editor
didn’t want my first idea, about a girl growing up on Mars. So what was
I going to do with that? I went back and made her three or four years
older, and I changed the plot to a love story, now that she was old enough
to be romantically interested in the pilot of this spaceship bound to Mars.
‘‘I was writing the last chapter of Marsbound on the train headed up
to Maine, and I was within ten pages of the end when I realized it needed
a sequel. So I went up to Maine for my ten-day writing retreat, finished
the novel, and started making notes for the sequel. But when I
wrote up the proposal for the sequel, Starbound, I realized
it had to be two more books. So I pitched it as a trilogy
(publishers love trilogies). But I started out to do a
young-adult novella.
‘‘One of the big problems of science fiction
is, ‘How did you get there from here?’ As
close as ten, 15 years in the future, you
don’t automatically have things changing
without progress in some direction. Even
if the ‘progress’ is catastrophic, there has
to be an intervening past. You do have to
think about that, if you’re the right kind of
science fiction writer. In my SF from the
past decades, when I tried for realism it was
like a kind of controlled cynicism – about
politics and religion and things like that. This
century is pretty much the way I predicted it,
in terms of negative aspects. None of what are
now current events have proven me wrong.
‘‘But this latest trilogy, I thought it was a pretty
optimistic view of the future! If you look at it a certain
way, it provides a sort of microcosm of American science
fiction history, and why not? But I didn’t write it that way. I wrote
it as the story of a woman.
‘‘My books have a lot of strong female characters. Maybe it’s my way
of writing about aliens. Females are alien, to a certain extent. Whenever
a man chooses to write from a female point of view, there has to be a
certain distancing, and another level of invention. The reality is different
for men and women: not just biological, but social reality. One thing that’s
very attractive about writing from a female point of view is that you have
to make everything up. There’s no default position. You have to go think
about that woman, and put yourself in her shoes, and see how she’s going
to react to situations. I don’t automatically know how a woman feels about
this or that – I have to figure it out every time.
‘‘The first female protagonist I had was Carol Wachall in Mindbridge.
I was writing this at the age of 26, and I did a mental exercise (I think I
made this up myself): ‘If I were a woman now, what would my situation
be?’ (At 24, I would not have been a soldier.) I took it all the way down
to infancy, then I grew her back up as a woman. That’s how I made this
sort of feminine reflection of my own personality. She wasn’t a main
character in the novel, so it was a little bit easier. Later, I was interested
enough to do a whole book from that point of view. I think you could find
a period in my life when most of my viewpoint characters were female.
(It would be a ten-year period that included the Worlds trilogy.) But I’m
not uncomfortable writing about men for my viewpoint characters.
‘‘I can’t ignore the fact that, in many ways, I’m a much more feminine
writer than most of the guys I know. Maybe it’s a natural way for me to
write. I don’t try to escape from the autobiographical aspect
of it. When it’s a female character, it’s, ‘What kind of
a woman would I be?’ More so than most writers,
I think, I really identified with my mother. (My
father was not a bad guy, but child-rearing was
not part of his job description.) My mother was
all for writing, art, and music – all the stuff
I liked to do. I always knew I was going to
be a scientist, but I wanted to do all these
extra things. Mother was on my side for the
science too, but she was very relieved that
I liked to draw and play music and write,
stuff like that.
‘‘I carry notebooks with me on my
travels, and along with plot diagrams etc.,
I do sketches. (I try to do science-fictional
pictures, and they look so phony!) Science
fiction is really important to me, but it never
intrudes on things like my watercolor painting
or the music – well, every now and then I’ll write
a science fiction song, because that’s my audience.
My mother used to cut up paper bags for me to have
paper to draw on, so I keep a stack of brown paper, to
paint and draw on.
‘‘I also write poetry that adheres to formal bounds. The sestina, like
science fiction, has its own set of rules, so the attraction must be similar.
I have a collection of formal poetry, but I can’t get a lot of enthusiasm
for sending out poetry books (they just come back). It’s important to me,
but not to my income, or my image as a writer. There’s a kind of freedom
to writing poetry, because I don’t care about the audience or the market.
‘‘I am writing a new novel that’s not directly associated with anything
I’ve done before. The protagonist is basically a guy who’s a lot like me,
and I don’t have to think very hard about what he does: ‘What would I
do? OK, I’ll type that down.’ He’s a writer (I’ve never written about a
writer for any length) who is also a disabled veteran. I thought, ‘Well,
why not? I’ll just go ahead and not be too cautious in that regard.’ And
he lives in Iowa City, as we did. It’s a layered novel that’s horror, science
fiction, and mainstream.’’
–Joe Haldeman �
LOCUS February 2012 / 7

PeoPle & Publishing
Connie Willis, SFWA Grand Master (2011)
Milestones
CONNIE WILLIS has been
named the 28th SFWA Grand Master,
with the award to be presented
at the Nebula Awards weekend in
Arlington VA, May 17-20, 2012.
GEORGE R.R. MaRTIN was
named the 2011 Author of the Year
by USA Today.
Awards
JOE R. LaNSDaLE & RICK
HaUTaLa will receive Lifetime
Achievement Awards from the
Horror Writers Association, to be
presented March 31, 2012 at the
World Horror Convention in Salt
Lake City UT. KaREN LaNS-
DaLE will receive the Richard
Layman President’s Award.
GENE WOLFE will receive
the first Fuller Award for lifetime
achievement in literature, presented
by the Chicago Literary Hall of
Fame at ‘‘An Evening to Honor
Gene Wolfe’’ on March 17, 2012 at
the Sanfilippo Estate in Barrington
Hills IL. Guests will include Neil
Gaiman, Audrey Niffenegger, Jody
Lynn Nye, Patrick O’Leary, Michael
Swanwick, and others.
Author PENELOPE LIVELY
was made a Dame of the Order of
the British Empire as part of the
Queen’s New Year’s Honours in
the UK. Writer MaGGIE GEE
was made an Officer of the Order
8 / LOCUS February 2012
of the British Empire.
Fanzine editor MIKE GLYER
won the Forry Award for Lifetime
Achievement in the Field of Science
Fiction, presented by the Los
Angeles Science Fantasy Society,
and named in honor of Forrest J
Ackerman.
Books Sold
JaCK McDEVITT sold new
Priscilla ‘‘Hutch’’ Hutchins novel
Starhawk and a second book to
Ginjer Buchanan at Ace via Chris
Lotts.
ALLEN STEELE sold Hex Liberation
to Ginjer Buchanan at Ace
via Martha Millard. Steele turned in
YA novel apollo’s Outcasts to Lou
Anders at Pyr.
SIMON R. GREEN sold three
more Ghostfinders novels and
Once in a Blue Moon, concluding
the Blue Moon trilogy, to Ginjer
Buchanan at Ace via Joshua Bilmes.
CaRLOS RUIZ ZaFÓN sold
The Prisoner of Heaven to Terry
Karten at Harper and Iris Tupholme
at Harper Canada via Thomas Colchie
on behalf of the Antonia Kerrigan
Agency in Barcelona.
JOHN BIRMINGHaM sold
three books in his Dave Hooper series
to David Pomerico at Del Rey
via Russell Galen.
MICHaEL COBLEY sold
Warcage and resold Seeds of
Earth, Orphaned Worlds, and The
asendant Stars to Orbit.
HWA Lifetime Achievement Awards Recepients:
Joe R. Lansdale (2011) & Rick Hautala (2000s)
Dame Penelope Lively (2000s) Maggie Gee (2000s)
ERIC BROWN’s Serene Invasion
sold to Jonathan Oliver at
Solaris via John Jarrold.
JES BaTTIS, writing as BaI-
LEY CUNNINGHaM, sold Pile
of Bones, Path of Frost, and Prize
of Night, in a new urban fantasy
series, to Ginjer Buchanan at Ace
via Lauren Abramo of Dystel &
Goderich Literary Management.
GUY aDaMS sold Deadbeat
and a second book about ‘‘two
drunken, ex-theatrical, amateur
detectives, who just happen to be
dead’’ to Cath Trechmann at Titan
Books via Sallyanne Sweeney of
Watson Little.
SCOTT BRITZ-CUNNING-
HaM sold Code White, a technothriller
pitched as reminiscent of
Michael Crichton, to Bob Gleason
at Tor via Al Zuckerman of Writers
House.
CLIFFORD BEaL sold Gideon’s
angel to Jonathan Oliver at
Solaris via Ian Drury of Shell Land
Associates.
NATE kENYON sold Day One
– ‘‘Cloverfield meets The Terminator’’
– to Brendan Deneen and Peter
Joseph at Thomas Dunne Books via
Howard Morhaim.
MELISSa OLSON sold vampire
thriller Dead Spots and a second
novel to Alex Carr at 47North
via Jacqueline Flynne of Joelle
Delbourgo Associates.
KaTHLEEN McKENNa sold
The Comeback, about a reality
show troubled by a ghost, to Debo-
Gene Wolfe (2010)
Mike Glyer (2006)
rah Smith of Bell Bridge Books.
JENNIFER ESTEP sold the
eighth, ninth, and tenth volumes
in her Elemental Assassin urban
fantasy series to Adam Wilson at
Pocket via Annelisa Robey of Jane
Rotrosen Agency.
JONaTHaN SCOTT FUQUa
sold urban fantasy The Mystery
of the Greaser Hotel to Bancroft
Press.
JOHN RUSSELL FEaRN’s
collections Dynasty of the Small,
The Man from Hell, and Rule of
the Brains sold to Borgo Books via
Phil Harbottle.
LaURENCE KLaVaN sold
collection The Family Unit and
Other Fantasies to ChiZine Publications
via Andrea Somberg of
Harvey Klinger.
MIKE aLLEN sold collection
The Button Bin and Other Horrors
to Apex Publications.
JOHN OTTE sold Numb to Jeff
Gerke at Marcher Lord Press via
Amanda Luedeke of MacGregor
Literary.
EMILY POHL-WEaRY sold
werewolf YA Freak to Robin Benjamin
at Marshall Cavendish, and Canadian
rights to Freak and a second
novel to Lynne Missen at Penguin
Canada, all via Ali McDonald of the
Rights Factory.

RICK YaNCEY sold his fourth
Monstrumologist book to David
Gale of Simon & Schuster UK
Children’s via Brian DeFiore.
ILSa J. BICK sold YA fantasy
White Space and a second book to
Greg Ferguson at Egmont via Jennifer
Laughran of Andrea Brown
Literary Agency.
JaMES DaSHNER sold his
Infinity Ring series, ‘‘an alternatehistory
time travel series combining
books, ‘Hystorian’s Guide’ collectible
maps and interactive features...
and an online game where readers
travel back in time to fix history,’’
to David Levithan at Scholastic
(for simultaneous publication in the
US, UK, Australia, New Zealand,
and Canada). Dashner will write
book one, a Mutiny in Time, with
subsequent volumes by CaRRIE
RYaN, LISa McMaNN, MaTT
DE La PEÑa, MaTTHEW
J. KIRBY, and JENNIFER a.
NIELSEN. Michael Bourret of
Dystel & Goderich Literary Management
negotiated for Dashner
and McMann, Jim McCarthy of
Dystel & Goderich negotiated
for Ryan, Steven Malk at Writers
House for de la Peña, Stephen Fraser
of Jennifer Di Chiara Agency for
Kirby, and Amni-Joane Paquette of
Erin Murphy Agency for Nielsen.
YVONNE WOON sold The
Netherworld, the final book in
her Dead Beautiful trilogy, to Abby
Ranger at Disney-Hyperion via Ted
Malawer of Upstart Crow Literary.
aLExaNDRa HaRVEY sold
vampire novels Blood Sisters and
Blood Moon and historical fantasy
The Regency Witches to Emily
Easton at Walker Children’s via
Marlene Stringer.
ELLEN RENNER sold Tribute
and a second book to Sarah
Odedina at Hot Key Books via
Jenny Savill of Andrew Nurnberg
Associates.
LORI aNN DUFFY, writing as
SHaNNON DUFFY, sold Spectral
to Nicole Langan at Tribute
Books via Lauren Hammond of
ADA Management Group.
Film director CHRIS COLUM-
BUS & author NED VIZZINI
sold their collaborative YA fantasy
House of Secrets and two more
books to Allesandra Balzer of Balzer
+ Bray via Dorian Karchmar of
William Morris Endeavor.
WENDY WEBB sold The Fate
of Mercy alban and a second book
to Elisabeth Dyssegaard at Hyperion
via Jennifer Weltz of the Jean
V. Naggar Agency.
DaN KROKOS sold The Planet
Thieves and a sequel to Whitney
Ross at Starscape via Suzie
Townsend of Nancy Coffey Literary.
STACEY JAY sold a futuristic
version of ‘‘Beauty and the Beast’’
and another book to Michelle Poploff
at Delacorte via Ginger Clark
of Curtis Brown.
GaRD SKINNER’s Game
Slaves, a YA SF about video game
characters who become self-aware,
sold to Julia Richardson at Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt at auction via
Andrew Stuart.
MELaNIE CROWDER’s
near-future ‘‘eco-fable’’ Water
sold to Reka Simonsen of Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt via Ammi-
Joan Paquette of Erin Murphy Literary
Agency.
PaGE MORGaN sold three
books in ‘‘gothic thriller series’’
Grotesque to Krista Marino at
Delacorte in a pre-empt via Ted
Malawer of Upstart Crow Literary.
KELLY HaSHWaY sold
Touch of Death and a second
book to Kate Kaynak of Spencer
Hill Press via Lauren Hammond of
ADA Management Group.
DaRBY KaRCHUT’s Finn
Finnegan, a middle-grade fantasy,
sold to Kate Kaynak at Spencer
Hill Press.
MICHELLE PICKETT sold
dystopian YA Pods to Kate Kaynak
at Spencer Hill Press.
CHRISTINE FONESCa sold
Dies Irae and three books in the
YA fantasy Requiem series to
Compass Press.
CaRRIE LOFTY sold paranormal
romance trilogy Dragon Kings
to Lauren McKenna at Pocket via
Kevan Lyon of Marsal Lyon Literary
Agency.
CINDY GREGORY, writing as
aSHLYN CHaSE, sold Flirting
with Fangs, first in a new paranormal
romance series, and two
more books to Deb Werksman at
Sourcebooks via Nicole Resciniti
of the Seymour Agency.
BONNIE VaNaK sold an untitled
paranormal romance and two
novellas to Ann Leslie Tuttle for
Harlequin Nocturne via Natasha
Kern.
KRISTIN MILLER sold Vamp
appeal, third in the Vampires of
Crimson Bay series, to Esi Sogah at
Avon Impulse via Nalini Akolekar
of Spencerhill Associates.
VICKI LEWIS THOMPSON
sold the next two books in werewolf
series Wild About You to
Claire Zion at
NAL via Robert
Gottlieb of
Trident Media
Group.
New writer
NaOMI
FOYLE sold
satirical SF
thriller Seoul
Survivors and
a second book
to Jo Fletcher
Books via Zeno
Agency.
New writer
KERRY
SCHaFER
sold Between
and Wake- Susan Ann Protter (2006)
world to Susan
Alison at Ace via Deidre Knight.
Schafer’s work was discovered
after it appeared on Bookcountry.
com, Penguin’s site where aspiring
authors may post their work and
critique the work of others.
PIERCE BROWN sold first
novel Red Rising and two more in
his trilogy set on a dystopian Mars
to David Pomerico at Del Rey in a
pre-empt via Hannah Bowman of
Liza Dawson Associates.
ROBERTRa TRaHaN sold
debut fantasy The Well of Tears to
Alex Carr at 47North via Jennifer
Schober of Spencerhill Associates.
PaUL KaNE & CHaRLES
PREPOLEC will edit Beyond Rue
Morgue, featuring stories about
Poe’s detective C. Auguste Dupin,
for Cath Trechman at Titan Books.
Books Resold
PaTRICK ROTHFUSS & illustrator
NaTE TaYLOR resold their
twisted children’s picture book The
adventure of Princess and Mr.
Whiffle to Sea Lion Books.
RaCHEL CaINE resold books
13, 14, and 15 in the Morganville
Vampires series to Susie Dunlop
of Allison & Busby in the UK via
Lucienne Diver of The Knight
Agency. NAL/Signet will publish
them in the US.
JENNIFER BOSWORTH
resold Struck to Ruth Knowles
at Random House UK Children’s
via Alex Webb of Rights People
on behalf of Holly Hunnicutt of
Macmillan Children’s.
Books Delivered
S.M. STIRLING delivered
Lord of Mountains to Ginjer Bu-
China Miéville (2010)
chanan at Roc.
MIKE SHEPHERD handed in
Kris Longknife: Furious to Ginjer
Buchanan at Ace.
WESTON OCHSE delivered
Seal Team 666 to Brendan Daneen
of Thomas Dunne Books.
TOM SNIEGOSKI turned in
Remy Chandler novel In the House
of the Wicked to Ginjer Buchanan
at Roc.
Publishing
BETSY MITCHELL, recently
retired as editor-in-chief of Del Rey,
has been hired by e-book publisher
Open Road Media as a ‘‘strategic
advisor’’ for SF and fantasy titles,
and will spearhead their acquisitions
of backlist SF.
SEaN WaLLaCE has returned
to his position as fiction editor
for Clarkesworld, effective immediately.
MEGHaN F. QUINN is now
a publicist for Prometheus Books.
JILL MaxICK has been promoted
to vice president of marketing
and director of publicity.
Agent SUSaN aNN PROTTER
has retired and is no longer considering
queries.
LaURa FITZGERaLD has
left Tor to join Orbit as an online
marketing associate.
Media
CHINa MIÉVILLE has been
hired to write a reboot of DC Comics
superhero comic series Dial H
for Hero. �
LOCUS February 2012 / 9

Supreme Court Rules on Copyright Case
In a decision that may have far-reaching
implications for the arts, the Supreme Court
of the United States ruled in mid-January 2012
that Congress may remove books, music, and
other works from the public domain, granting
them new copyright status. The 6-to-2 ruling
(Justice Elena Kagan recused herself) contends
the public domain is not a ‘‘territory that works
may never exit.’’
The case was brought by a group of orchestra
conductors, teachers, publishers, film archivists,
and others who rely on out-of-copyright
works for their businesses. The works in contention
were foreign, and were once considered
public domain in the US, though they were still
under copyright in other countries. In 1994,
Congress passed a law bringing those works
back into copyright in the States, as part of an
attempt to bring US law into agreement with
the international copyright treaty the Berne
Convention.
The plaintiffs argued that it was unconstitutional
to move works back into copyright after
they’d already entered the public domain, and
expressed concern that giving Congress the
ability to remove works from the public domain
Many artists, musicians, filmmakers, and
authors (including, prominently, Neil Gaiman
and Cory Doctorow) joined a successful protest
urging the US Senate and the US House of
Representatives to halt work on two pieces of
ongoing legislation: The Protect IP Act (PIPA)
in the House, and the Stop Online Piracy Act
(SOPA) in the Senate. These bills, supported by
the Motion Picture Association of America and
the Recording Industry Association of America,
were ostensibly aimed at fighting piracy of
copyrighted material online. Both bills have
now been ‘‘delayed,’’ with leaders in both the
House and the Senate confirming the bills will
not move forward.
The proposed mechanism for fighting piracy
could have shut down websites that didn’t intentionally
host pirated material, along with
websites that even linked to sites hosting such
material. Entire domain names could have been
cut off from access by US web users, potentially
damaging the structural underpinnings of the
Internet. The law would have required Internet
service providers to disable links to websites
that allegedly hosted infringing content, with
minimal judicial oversight. Website owners
would have been forced to monitor the activities
of all their users, and if any of those users
distributed copyrighted material, the sites could
have been shut down – a stark change from the
current ‘‘safe harbor’’ provisions that protect
websites if their users commit acts of piracy
without the awareness of the site owners. Sites
with heavily trafficked discussion boards might
have been forced to shut down such communities,
since even a single users posting an infringing
file could, in theory, lead to the whole
site being cut off from the Internet.
Free speech groups (including the Electronic
10 / LOCUS February 2012
could lead to a state of perpetual copyright in
the US. The Supreme Court did not agree. The
majority opinion states that, ‘‘in aligning the
United States with other nations bound by the
Berne Convention, and thereby according equitable
treatment to once disfavored foreign
authors, Congress can hardly be charged with
a design to move stealthily toward a regime of
perpetual copyrights.’’
In a dissenting opinion, Justices Stephen
Breyer and Samuel Ailito said the law violates
the spirit of the constitution’s copyright
clause because it ‘‘does not encourage anyone
to produce a single new work,’’ and instead
‘‘bestows monetary rewards only on owners
of old works in the American public domain.
The statute inhibits the dissemination of those
works, foreign works published abroad after
1923, of which there are many millions, including
films, works of art, innumerable photographs,
and, of course, books – books that
(in the absence of the statute) would assume
their rightful places in computer-accessible databases,
spreading knowledge throughout the
world.’’ �
Artists On SOPA/PIPA
Frontier Foundation) were understandably concerned
about giving the government the power
to shut down websites, seeing it as a tool that
could be used for purposes other than enforcing
copyright – like stifling political dissent.
Cory Doctorow wrote on Boing Boing that:
even though a substantial portion of my
living comes from the entertainment industry,
I don’t think that any amount of ‘piracy’
justifies this kind of depraved indifference
to the consequences of one’s actions. Big
Content haven’t just declared war on Boing
Boing and Reddit and the rest of the
‘fun’ Internet: they’ve declared war on every
person who uses the net to publicize
police brutality, every oppressed person
in the Arab Spring who used the net to
organize protests and publicize the blood
spilled by their oppressors, every abused
kid who used the net to reveal her father as
a brutalizer of children, every gay kid who
used the net to discover that life is worth
living despite the torment she’s experiencing,
every grassroots political campaigner
The 2011 World Fantasy Awards judges have
been announced. To be considered for awards,
all materials must be received by all five judges
and the convention by June 1, 2012. All forms of
fantasy qualify; only living authors and editors
are eligible; all books must have a 2011 publication
date and all magazines a 2011 cover date.
Send works to: John Berlyne, Zeno Agency
Ltd, Primrose Hill Business Centre, 110 Gloucester
Avenue, London NW1 8HX, United Kingdom;
James P. Blaylock, 157 N. Pine Street, Orange
CA 92666, USA; Stephen Gallagher, St Judes
Cottage, Abbott Brow, Mellor, Blackburn BB2
7HT, United Kingdom; Mary Kay Kare, 908 15th
Avenue East, Seattle WA 98112, USA; Jacques
2011 Dick
Award Finalists
The final ballot for the 2011 Philip K. Dick
Award has been announced:
The Company Man,
Robert Jackson Bennett (Orbit)
Deadline, Mira Grant (Orbit)
The Other, Matthew Hughes (Underland)
a Soldier’s Duty, Jean Johnson (Ace)
The Postmortal, Drew Magary (Penguin)
after the apocalypse,
Maureen F. McHugh (Small Beer)
The Samuel Petrovich Trilogy,
Simon Morden (Orbit)
The award will be presented April 6, 2012 at
Norwescon 35 in SeaTac WA.
The Philip K. Dick Award is presented annually
to honor distinguished science fiction
published as a paperback original in the US
during the award year, and is sponsored by the
Philadelphia Science Fiction Society. The winner
receives a cash prize of $1,000 and a trip
to Norwescon. Judges for the 2011 award are
Scott Baker, Mark Budz, Roby James, Darrell
Schweitzer, and Alice K. Turner. For more:
.�
who uses the net to make her community
a better place – as well as the scientists
who collaborate online, the rescue workers
who coordinate online, the makers
who trade tips online, the people with rare
diseases who support each other online,
and the independent creators who use the
Internet to earn their livings. The contempt
for human rights on display with SOPA and
PIPA is more than foolish. Foolishness can
be excused. It’s more than greed. Greed is
only to be expected. It is evil, and it must
be fought.
Author Neil Gaiman joined a group of artists
(including his wife, musician Amanda Palmer)
in writing an open letter to Washington that
reads, in part,
As creative professionals, we experience
copyright infringement on a very personal
level. Commercial piracy is deeply unfair and
pervasive leaks of unreleased films and music
regularly interfere with the integrity of our
creations. We are grateful for the measures
� p. 74
World Fantasy Judges Announced
Post, Tjaskerlaan 20, 3052 HP Rotterdam, The
Netherlands. A copy should also go to Peter Dennis
Pautz, President, World Fantasy Awards Association,
PO Box 43, Mukilteo WA 98275-0043.
Packages should be labeled ‘‘Promotional
materials – not for sale or resale – no commercial
value – World Fantasy Awards materials.’’ Winners
will be announced at the 2012 World Fantasy
Awards Banquet and Ceremony during the 38th
World Fantasy Convention, November 1 – 4,
2012, at the Sheraton Parkway Toronto North
Hotel in Ontario, Canada. (Life Achievement
nominees will not be released; the winner will
be announced in advance of the banquet.) For
more: . �

The DaTa File
Borders Bankruptcy Winding Down •
The bankruptcy proceedings at Borders are
winding down. The bankruptcy court approved
a liquidation plan on December 20, 2011, which
involves the sale of the company’s interest in
e-book company Kobo and its IP addresses. A
pool of about $80-90 million will be split up
among creditors, which means they could see
as much as ten cents on the dollar (or more) paid
out – on the high end of the 4-10 cents originally
estimated. Judge Martin Glenn thanked the
attorneys for Borders and the Creditors Committee:
‘‘I think you’ve all worked cooperatively
in difficult circumstances. You’ve all worked
rapidly, which has maximized the estate, and
as in the Kobo sale, the stars were aligned.’’
Another hearing in mid-February will be held
to settle some outstanding claims.
B&N to Sell Sterling • Barnes & Noble has
put its Sterling Publishing arm for sale, moving
away from publishing to focus on their e-reading
devices. B&N has been publishing books
since the ’70s, and purchased Sterling in 2003
for $115 million. In 2009, they consolidated all
their in-house publishing programs into Sterling
to improve efficiency.
Agency Model Antitrust News • Lawyer
Steve Berman of Seattle firm Hagens Berman
has been appointed as lead counsel for the numerous
antitrust lawsuits being brought against
most of the major publishers and Apple. The
lawsuits allege that those companies colluded
to fix e-book prices when they switched to the
agency model for e-book sales. Under the agency
model, publishers set e-book prices which
retailers cannot change, and retailers take a percentage
of that price with each sale. This differs
from normal trade terms, where retailers buy
merchandise at a wholesale discount and set
whatever price point they think is appropriate.
Numerous lawsuits on this subject were filed
last year, and a federal judicial panel ordered
they all be transferred to New York and tried
together. As a result, many of the individual
attorneys argued for the right to run the case.
Berman filed the first case in California, which
was a factor in Senior US District Judge Denise
Cote’s decision to give him the lead counsel
position. Another firm, Cohen Milstein, was
appointed to assist him. Helen D. Jaffe of New
York firm Weil, Gotshal, & Manges is acting as
the liaison for the various attorneys representing
the publishers being sued, which include
HarperCollins, Penguin, Hachette, and Simon
& Schuster, along with Apple and (in a few
complaints) Amazon – though Amazon is likely
to be dropped as a defendant, as it vigorously
opposed adoption of the agency model. Notable
in its absence is Random House, the only ‘‘Big
Six’’ publisher to delay adoption of the agency
model until well after all the other publishers
had made the change. The US Justice Department
is also investigating antitrust allegations.
Open Road Lawsuit • HarperCollins filed a
lawsuit in December 2011 against e-book pub-
lisher Open Road Media regarding the latter’s
electronic publication of Julie of the Wolves,
a YA novel by Jean Craighead George. Harper-
Collins, which first published the book in 1972
and still has it in print, is seeking damages and
injunctive relief against Open Road. Because
Harper’s contract with George grants them the
‘‘exclusive right to publish in book form’’ and
makes reference to publication ‘‘through computer,
computer-stored, mechanical or electronic
means now known or hereafter invented,’’
HarperCollins believes they own the e-book
rights.
The question of whether rights to e-books are
implicitly included in contracts drawn up long
before e-books existed is one that has recurred
frequently in recent years, with most publishers
arguing that ‘‘in book form’’ includes e-books.
Many agents disagree. Robert Gottlieb of Trident
Media Group has argued, ‘‘If such language
truly covered e-books, there would be no
reason today for publishers to specifically state
that e-books are covered in the agreements they
are making with authors.’’ Random House sued
e-book publisher Rosetta Books ten years ago
for nearly identical reasons, though the two parties
eventually settled out of court.
Further complicating matters is the fact that
Open Road is publishing an ‘‘enhanced e-book’’
edition of the novel, with additional material,
which could arguably make it a separate version
from the one HarperCollins published.
Interestingly, HarperCollins has chosen not to
sue the author, even though she is the one who
sold e-book rights to Open Road. Nor has Open
Road asserted that any legal liability would fall
on the author, though the terms of their contract
would almost certainly allow them to do
so – most contracts include a warranty from the
author asserting that they own the rights being
licensed. Assuming HarperCollins and Open
Road don’t settle, and this lawsuit is fully litigated,
the result would be a powerful precedent
that could affect countless authors and publishers.
Agents, authors, and publishing executives
are watching it closely.
UK Bestsellers of 2011 • Nielsen Bookscan
UK has released sale numbers for the bestselling
titles of 2011. Hardcover fiction sales were
led by Snuff, Terry Pratchett (194,034 copies),
which came in at #32 on the overall list of bestsellers.
Other genre titles in the top 20 include
#6 a Dance with Dragons, George R.R. Martin
(86,712); #11 11/22/63, Stephen King (64,069);
and #18 Dead Reckoning, Charlaine Harris
(49,556) – none of those sold enough to make
the overall top 100. The paperback fiction list
includes #10 a Game of Thrones, George R.R.
Martin (255,726), which was #13 on the Top
100 list. The YA/Children’s list included #11 Inheritance,
Christopher Paolini (146,893), which
placed #68 overall and #13 Breaking Dawn,
Stephenie Meyer (134,409), which was #87
overall. a Clash of Kings, George R.R. Martin,
was #76 on the overall list, with 141,212 sales,
too few for it to place in the top 20 paperbacks.
SF/fantasy titles sold 2,389,088 copies in all,
while YA fiction sold 3,353,629. The total book
market in the UK last year was £605,537,554.
SF/fantasy was responsible for £17.8 million,
while YA fiction brought in £20.1 million.
Announcements • The 36th annual Jack
Williamson Lectureship will be held March
29-30 at Eastern New Mexico University in
Portales NM. This year’s theme is urban fantasy,
and guests of honor are Daniel Abraham
and Carrie Vaughn. Connie Willis will appear
as mistress of ceremonies. For more: , or call
(575) 562-2315.
A stage adaptation of Cory Doctorow’s Little
Brother premiered at the Custom Made Theatre
Co. in San Francisco, January 13, 2012, and will
run through February 11, 2012. For tickets and
more information: .
James Gunn’s Ad Astra, ‘‘an online resource
for authors, scholars and all those who are interested
in speculative fiction’’ from the Kansas
University Center for the Study of Science Fiction,
has released a call for submissions of short
fiction and poetry. Issue editor Isaac Bell writes,
‘‘The theme for the issue will be communication
and information. We are looking for submissions
that express communication as a central element
of the story or message.’’ Submissions will be
judged by a panel of editors, with the authors
of published stories to receive an honorarium of
not less than $50 for stories and $20 for poems.
Some authors may be invited to attend the 2012
Campbell Conference, July 5-8, 2012 in Lawrence
KS, where the issue will be released. For
more: .
The University of California Riverside is
accepting applications for a tenure-track position
in science fiction media studies, seeking
‘‘candidates who specialize in science fiction
in cinema and mass media, visual, auditory,
and/or performance art, with a strong record
of teaching and scholarly publication on science
fiction in more than one non-print medium
(film, television, animation, digital culture,
hypertext, video games, installation or
intermedia arts, performance art, comics, and
illustration). PhD or its equivalent in a relevant
discipline... is required.’’ Applications should
be sent to the chair of the search committee,
Rob Latham, at .
For more details: .
Worldcons News • Chicon 7, the 70th World
Science Fiction Convention, August 30 - September
3, 2012 in Chicago IL, published Press
Release #5 on December 16, 2011, announcing
‘‘The 7 Days of Chicon,’’ offering reduced
membership rates from December 20-26, 2011.
Press Release #6, December 21, 2011, extended
the submission deadline for the Hugo Award
Base Design competition to January 15, 2012.
Press Release #7, January 4, 2012, announced
the opening of the nomination period for the
Hugo Awards and the John W. Campbell Award
for Best New Writer. Those who have acquired
� p. 74
LOCUS February 2012 / 11

garDnersPace: a shorT FicTion column by garDner Dozois �
The Book of Cthulhu, Ross E. Lockhart, ed.
(Night Shade) September 2011.
New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird, Paula Guran,
ed. (Prime) November 2011.
Sense of Wonder: a Century of Science Fiction,
Leigh Ronald Grossman, ed. (Wildside)
June 2011.
Clarkesworld 11/11
Tor.com 12/13/11, 12/14/11
The stories of H.P. Lovecraft, especially the
stories in the Cthulhu Mythos cycle, have been
influencing other writers for almost a hundred
years now, starting with writers such as Fritz
Leiber and Robert Bloch, and continuing on
through Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Neil
Gaiman, William Browning Spencer, China
Miéville, and dozens of others. By now, here in
the 21st century, there are third and even fourth
generations of writers influenced either directly
by Lovecraft or by authors who were influenced
by him, and Lovecraft’s work can be demonstrated
to have had a major impact on the development
of horror, fantasy, and even science
fiction.
The question is, why?
By modern standards, Lovecraft is a mediocre
to terrible writer line-by-line, his fustian
prose overloaded with adjectives (sometimes
to the point of near-impenetrability), his dialog
stilted, his characters one-dimensional (and often
difficult to distinguish one from the other),
his plots repetitive, and his racism undeniable.
The only reason I can think of for his continuing
influence is his vision. Lovecraft was one of
the earliest writers to shake off a 19th-century
world that was dominated by the idea of sin and
redemption, heaven and hell, devils and angels,
and instead showed us a cosmos ruled by vast,
impersonal, implacable forces that humans not
only didn’t but probably couldn’t understand.
As the narrator says in Lovecraft’s story ‘‘The
Call of Cthulhu’’: ‘‘We live on a placid island
of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity,
and it was not meant that we should voyage
far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction,
have hitherto harmed us little, but some
14 / LOCUS February 2012
day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge
will open up such terrifying vistas of reality,
and of our frightful position therein, that we
shall either go mad from the revelation or flee
from the deadly light into the peace and safety
of a new Dark Age.’’
In Lovecraft’s cosmos, Good and Evil don’t
enter into the equation. If one of those implacable,
unknowable cosmic forces decided to destroy
the Earth, perhaps without even noticing
or caring that it was doing so, the good people
praying to Jesus in a church would be as helpless
and doomed as the blackest sinners in a tavern
or brothel. God couldn’t save you – that's
as radical a notion as the 20th century would
produce, and one antithetical to almost everything
written in the 19th. As Lovecraft himself
said, ‘‘I don’t make the mistake of thinking that
the... cosmos... gives a damn one way or the
other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare
of mosquitoes, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses,
pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms
of biological energy.’’
As the 20th century has progressed into the
21st, and as our picture of the universe has gotten
deeper, more complex, and far, far stranger
than anyone could have imagined in the 1930s,
it’s become clear that we’re living in a Lovecraftian
cosmos, one where the Earth could be
destroyed – or at least human life wiped from
it – without warning at any moment by an asteroid
strike, a nearby supernova, a burst of hard
gamma radiation from the galactic core, a supervolcano
explosion, or any of a dozen other
menaces, and that God couldn’t (or wouldn’t)
save us either. No wonder Lovecraft’s work
continues to resonate with young writers today,
in spite of his literary shortcomings.
Lovecraft’s own work has been canonized in
H.P. Lovecraft: Tales, part of the prestigious
series from Library of America, which firmly
establishes his place in literature as a Significant
American Writer (something that no doubt
would have astounded Lovecraft himself as
much as it would have dismayed my old mentor
Damon Knight, who despised his work),
but 2011 also brought us two reprint anthologies
that give us an interesting overview of the
recent work of younger writers who have been
influenced by Lovecraft enough to want to play
in his Cthulhu Mythos universe, The Book of
Cthulhu, edited by Ross E. Lockhart, and New
Cthulhu: The Recent Weird, edited by Paula
Guran.
Both anthologies are solid value, particularly
if you have a taste for Lovecraftian horror
(if you don’t, as many people do not, stay
away from both). The best stories in The Book
of Cthulhu include ‘‘Fat Face’’ by Michael
Shea, ‘‘Lord of the Land’’ by Gene Wolfe,
‘‘Black Man With a Horn’’ by T.E.D. Klein,
‘‘The Unthinkable’’ by Bruce Sterling, and
‘‘The Man from Porlock’’ by Laird Barron.
The best stories in New Cthulhu: The Recent
Weird include ‘‘a Study in Emerald’’ by Neil
Gaiman, ‘‘Mongoose’’ by Elizabeth Bear &
Sarah Monette, ‘‘Pickman’s Other Model
(1929)’’ by Caitlin R. Kiernan, ‘‘Old Virginia’’
by Laird Barron, and ‘‘Take Me To the
River’’ by Paul Mcauley.
Stories that appear in both volumes, and
which are among the very best in either, are ‘‘A
Colder War’’ by Charles Stross, ‘‘Shoggoths
in Bloom’’ by Elizabeth Bear, and ‘‘Bad Sushi’’
by Cherie Priest. ‘‘Shoggoths in Bloom’’,
of course, won a Hugo, but the story that strikes
me as the most significant here is ‘‘a Colder
War’’, originally published in 2000, which
established a relationship between Lovecraftian
horror and Cold War politics that I’ve seen
echoed subsequently in many other stories, including
this year’s ‘‘The Vorkuta Event’’ by Ken
Macleod.
A discussion of reprint anthologies published
in 2011 wouldn’t be complete without mention
of Sense of Wonder: a Century of Science
Fiction, edited by Leigh Ronald Grossman,
which earns the odd distinction of being perhaps
the largest SF anthology ever published:
almost a thousand pages, roughly the size of
an old-fashioned telephone directory, weighing
five pounds, and containing 148 stories and
62 specialized essays about various authors
and categories of science fiction. At almost 50
bucks, this will probably be too expensive for
most casual readers (there is an e-book version
available for $40), but it’s a great choice for libraries
and serious collectors, as it's practically a
� p. 66

locus looks aT shorT FicTion: rich horTon �
Redstone 10/11, 12/11
Beneath Ceaseless Skies 12/15/11
Apex 11/11
Abyss & Apex Fourth Quarter 2011
Strange Horizons 10/11
Clarkesworld 11/11, 1/12
Lightspeed 12/11
Asimov’s 2/12
Analog 3/12
Conjunctions 57
a Book of Horrors, Stephen Jones (Jo Fletcher
Books) September 2011
Eastercon Souvenir Book, 2011
It’s time to catch up with some of the better
online sites that I’ve neglected in recent months.
More and more, as often noted to be sure, much
of the best SF and fantasy appears online.
Let’s begin with a site that I haven’t noticed
until recently, but which has really been publishing
some strong work: Redstone. For instance,
‘‘iTime’’ by Ferrett Steinmetz from the October
issue is about a device which allows its user to go
back in time and replay the past few hours. The
narrator’s rich but shallow roommate gets one
and uses it for a variety of things, including doing
better in school (by retaking tests, for example),
and doing better with men (by replaying conversations,
perhaps). This works for a while, but
there are consequences... for more than just the
user. Or, from December, there's ‘‘Time, Like
Blood, on My Hands’’ by Eric Del Carlo, about
a man who was separated from his wife when
time fractured so that people were randomly
distributed in independent ‘‘tiers of time.’’ He
is shown meeting an old school friend, and then
a younger woman – but of course not his wife.
The story movingly shows his loss and longing.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies remains a consistently
strong source of fantasy. The issue of
December 15th has two strong stories. Derek
Künsken’s ‘‘The God Thieves’’ is set in an
alternate-historical Italy, where Genoa and Venice
use god-powered weaponry in their battle for
supremacy. Their operatives enhance themselves
by taking on the characteristics of other beings,
which means hosting the being's soul. In this
story a Genoese agent is pressed against his
will to host a dragon’s soul in order to help steal
a new god from Venice. For nicely explained
reasons this ultimately is at the cost of part of
his soul. Peadar Ó Guilín’s ‘‘Heartless’’ is
about an isolated city maintained by magic, at
the cost of turning family members into witches.
Malern rebels against this custom, facing the
loss of the last of her brothers, then, inevitably,
either herself or her sister. In punishment her
heart is taken, meaning only magic can sustain
her. Thus the ruler of the city forces her to make
a stark moral choice. The story quite smartly
portrays the consequences of her choice, and in
passing the consequences of the city’s centuries
of choices to maintain such magic-fueled lives.
One advantage to Lynne Thomas replacing
Catherynne M. Valente as editor at Apex is that
the latter is now free to place her fiction there.
In November we got ‘‘The Bread We Eat in
Dreams’’, a fine example. It’s about a demon
exiled to a village in Maine, at just about the
easternmost part of the US, and it follows the demon’s
career over some five centuries, as ‘‘she’’
influences this split town (Catholic/Protestant)
and particularly its young women.
Abyss & Apex (no relation to Apex!) for the
fourth quarter has some nice work. ‘‘Keeping
Tabs’’ by Kenneth Schneyer is solid near
future social extrapolation SF. A struggling
waitress manages to buy a ‘‘Tab’’ on a favorite
actress – the right to experience the actress’s
life from the inside at random times. The story
moves to a moral point nicely, if a bit patly,
as it parallels the waitress’s fraught love life
with the actress’s. On the fantasy side, I quite
enjoyed ‘‘Silvergrass Mirror’’ by amanda M.
Hayes. Eisle is an expert at finding rare herbs,
and she is engaged by the wizard Lord of her
district to accompany him in finding the rumored
‘‘silvergrass,’’ which can be made to show your
beloved from a distance. The drawbacks to this
knowledge can be speculated on, and the story
bittersweetly portrays them.
From the October Strange Horizons I liked
‘‘The Fourth Board’’ by D.J. Muir, about a
woman who can see the future, and her father’s
old friend, the Tyrant, who wants her help. But
everything is complicated, by the knowledge
of her power, and by the Tyrant’s opponent’s
knowledge.... The title refers to a game, and
to the external information needed to win the
game, and the story weaves that effectively into
the protagonist’s problem.
The November Clarkesworld features an
outstanding Lavie Tidhar story, ‘‘The Smell
of Orange Groves’’. It’s set at a spaceport –
Central Station – perched between the divided
cities of Tel Aviv and Jaffa, in a future where
Arabs and Jews share that land, perhaps uneasily.
The spaceport points to an offworld future,
one in which Boris Aaron Chong is returning
to be with his dying father. The center of the
story is Boris’s ancestor, Zhang Weiwei, and
the mysterious deal he made with an ‘‘Other’’
(an AI) to allow his memories, and his whole
line’s memories, to be passed down to his descendants.
The story shows a real future with
real inhabitants and complex issues that don’t
just seem restatements of today’s conflicts, all
grounded in a meditation about memory and our
connections with the past.
Clarkesworld starts the new year very
strongly as well. In January, Rahul Kanakia
contributes ‘‘What Everyone Remembers’’,
told from the viewpoint of a sentient insect-like
creature designed as a potential replacement
from humans in a ruined future. Still better is
a remarkable aliette de Bodard story, ‘‘Scattered
along the River of Heaven’’. It presents
a series of snapshots from the life of Xu Anshi,
one of the leaders of a revolution by the Mheng
against the San-Tay people on a space colony,
alternated with the visit of one Xu Wen to San-
Tay for her grandmother’s funeral. The story
cunningly fills in the most of the blanks: who
these people are, what they did, why they did
� p. 66
THIS MONTH IN HISTORY
February 12, 2015. Occupy Keystone incorporates.
The 55,000 population (est.) tent
city in the Nebraska sandhills, the largest of
the .99’s nationwide network, is the first to
be awarded a zip code.
LOCUS February 2012 / 15

locus looks aT books: gary k. WolFe �
Hide Me among the Graves, Tim Powers
(William Morrow 978-0-06-123154-4, $25.99,
512pp, hc) March 2012.
The Games, Ted Kosmatka (Del Rey 978-0-
345-52661-8, $25.00, 362pp, hc) March 2012.
Distrust That Particular Flavor, William
Gibson (Putnam’s 978-0-399-15843-8, $26.95,
256pp, hc) January 2012.
It’s been more than two decades since Tim
Powers’s The Stress of Her Regard appeared
in 1989, and, rather appallingly, it was out of
print for several of those years until Tachyon
issued a new edition a few years ago. It’s always
been among my favorite Powers novels,
partly because it’s a sheer wallow for English
lit majors, with the Romantic poets who lurked
in the background for much of The anubis
Gates getting full turns onstage, and it left a
lot of us wondering what Powers – who set
The anubis Gates near the beginning of the
19th century and The Stress of Her Regard
in 1816 and later – might make of the rest of
that fantasy gold mine of a century. Instead,
throughout the 1990s, he gave us generally rewarding
detours to Las Vegas and California
in the Fault Lines series of novels (Last Call,
Expiration Date, and Earthquake Weather),
even venturing into John le Carré cold war
territory with Declare, which remains one of
his strongest novels in purely literary terms.
Meanwhile, for an entire generation of readers,
the whole Victorian era got transformed into
a kind of theme park for steampunk, a mode
which Powers, along with his pals James Blaylock
and K.W. Jeter, arguably invented way
back in the ’80s. As for the new novel, Hide
Me among the Graves, Powers gave us a hint
of what he was up to with ‘‘A Time to Cast
Away Stones’’, which appeared in his Tachyon
collection The Bible Repairman and Other
Stories last year and which serves as a convenient
link between The Stress of Her Regard
and this one. That story, set in 1824, featured
Edward Trelawney, who had known Keats and
Shelley during their struggles with lamia and
nephelim, who himself had suffered a nearfatal
bullet wound during the Greek war of
independence, and who managed to make it
out of Greece with, among other things, Shelley’s
jawbone. The jawbone, the bullet wound,
and Trelawney himself all play central roles in
Hide Me among the Graves, and Trelawney
emerges in both the novel and the story as one
of Powers’s most complex creations – vain,
foolishly ambitious, and heroic all at once –
but he’s not really at the center of the tale.
Instead, the tale focuses on two sets of characters,
one historical, one fictional. Powers
seems to view history in much the same way a
hungry cat views a disabled mouse, so it’s no
real surprise that his historical figures turn out
to be the Rossetti siblings – Christina, Dante
Gabriel, William, and Maria – who were haunted
enough on their own terms even without the
aid of vampires and predatory spirits. For one
thing, their uncle was John Polidori, the friend
16 / LOCUS February 2012
and physician of Byron’s who was present at
the famous 1816 storytelling session that gave
birth to Frankenstein and Polidori’s own The
Vampyre, and who also figured in The Stress
of Her Regard. He’s long deceased as the
novel opens in 1862 (after an important set-up
prologue in 1845), but as we soon learn, not
quite deceased enough: a well-meaning ritual
by the teenage Christina has given him entrée
into the psychic life of the family (these things,
like many vampires, have to be invited in), and
he returns in force years later, now allied with
ancient malignant forces dating back to Roman
Britain. Dante Gabriel, for his part, is obsessed
with guilt over the death of his model-turnedwife-turned
laudanum addict Elizabeth Siddal,
leaving an original manuscript of his poems in
her coffin, only to have it later exhumed ostensibly
to retrieve the poems (this is a part that
Powers didn’t even have to make up, though
of course in his version retrieving the poems
is only a ruse).
Parallel to the story of the Rossettis is the
tale of the fictional John Crawford, a veterinary
surgeon whose name might ring a bell
to those who remember Michael Crawford,
the protagonist of The Stress of Her Regard
(John recalls his parents telling him they were
related to ‘‘a species of vampire’’). Grieving
over the death of his wife and sons years earlier,
Crawford is sought out by Adelaide McKee,
a former prostitute whom Crawford had previously
encountered under very weird circumstances
on Waterloo Bridge, and who tells him
they now share a daughter – and one who is
in mortal peril at that. It’s not long before we
realize that the same supernatural forces plaguing
the Rossettis are threatening their daughter,
and eventually they all join forces in a series
of increasingly and wildly spooky adventures
involving vast caverns beneath London, revenants
of various types, and even the occasional
demon – all the while aided by the wonderfully
ambiguous and problematical figure of the aging
Trelawny, who plays something of a Van
Helsing role for much of the narrative. Subterranean
London has nearly become a genre unto
itself in the past several years, but here it gets
the full Powers treatment, and it’s like discovering
it for the first time. Meticulous as always
in his research, Powers also draws an engaging
portrait of London itself, with its dire poverty
contrasted with the newly finished Thames em-
bankment, an emblem of a landscape increasingly
transformed by Victorian engineering
and optimism.
But Hide Me among the Graves is not
merely a sequel to The Stress of Her Regard,
and that novel is no way a prerequisite to enjoying
it. In the decades since Stress appeared
– with novels such as Last Call or Declare
– Powers has notably refined his novelistic
skills. His set pieces are no less spectacular
and his plotting no less kinetic, but the prose is
more measured and less overripe than in those
earlier works, the characters more complex
and conflicted, the action more tightly focused
(nearly all of it takes place in London over a
15-year period, rather than wandering all over
Europe). Especially notable are Christina, torn
between the devoutness of her sister Maria and
the aestheticism of Dante and his Pre-Raphaelite
friends (who barely put in an appearance at
all); Adelaide, easily the coolest kick-ass character
here; and the magnificently self-absorbed
yet ambivalently heroic Trelawny. Only the
youthful Swinburne, who plays a crucial role
late in the novel, comes off as a bit of a caricature,
a foppish Victorian Carrot Top who never
has a clue as to what he’s gotten into. And, in
a subtle touch of embedded lit-crit, the same
eldritch forces that threaten the Rossettis (and
even London itself) also serve as muses: when
they’re around, Christina and Dante and Swinburne
produce their finest poetry and art; when
they’re not, the work turns mediocre. Those
same nephelim seem to do wonders for Powers
as well; this is his best novel in years, and the
Rossettis seem a better match for his morally
complex art than even the earlier Romantics.
Of course, if it is the nephelim behind what
Powers is up to, we might be well advised to
avoid him at conventions, or at least not invite
him up to our rooms.
Ted Kosmatka has been one of the most
intriguing short fiction writers to emerge in
the last few years, garnering something like
a half-dozen Year’s Best selections and a Nebula
nomination on the basis of scarcely more
than a dozen widely varied stories, though he
often returns to themes of genetics and genetic
engineering (one of the most impressive,
‘‘The Prophet of Flores’’, imagined a creationscience
based scientific community trying to
grapple with the real-world discovery of those

hobbit-like hominids on the Indonesian island
of Flores). When any such hot new writer
turns in their first novel it’s worth our attention,
especially if that writer is as eclectic as
Kosmatkas, and one of the questions that inevitably
comes to mind is whether those attractive
idiosyncrasies will shape the novel,
or whether the writer, most likely having been
told by practically everyone that a novel is a
far more commercial enterprise than a short
story, will opt for the more formulaic kind
of accessibility that at least gets you in the
waiting room for bestsellerdom. In the case
of Kosmatka’s first novel, The Games, it’s a
little of both.
Even the title suggests that Kosmatka has
an ear to the market. The games in question
are near-future Olympic games, which have
been pumped up by the addition of deadly
contests between ‘‘gladiators,’’ who aren’t,
as you might suspect, supersteroidal monster
athletes, but real monsters: the competition is
really between each country’s team of genetic
engineers, who design ever more fearsome
battle-creatures with the only restriction being
that no human DNA can be incorporated into
the design. The notion of increasingly violent
and politicized Olympic contests – or sports
in general for that matter – isn’t new in SF;
almost three decades ago Asimov, Greenberg,
and Waugh put together an entire anthology
titled Science Fictional Olympics, and even
before that we had William Harrison’s ‘‘Rollerball’’
and the movie, and the ultraviolent
version of football in Killerbowl by Gary
K. Wolf (not related, for the last time!). But
those at least focused on human competitors,
and were essentially high-tech adaptations of
familiar sports plots such as the aging champion.
The Games barely pays a nod to the
human competition at all, and the actual account
of the Olympic monster mash is so brief
and marginal to the overall plot that the title
would seem almost misleading, were it not for
the almost inescapable suspicion that, with the
novel being released the same month as the
movie The Hunger Games, there’s a bit of
opportunity-snagging involved. Even the promotional
copy blares ‘‘Jurassic Park meets
The Hunger Games’’, a claim that manages
to completely misrepresent both of those novels
as well as Kosmatka’s – a rare feat for any
ad copywriter.
None of this is Kosmatka’s fault, of course,
since what he’s written is an honest, fast-moving,
and reasonably suspenseful Frankenstein
tale that comes fully prepped for its own movie.
As the annual genetic-engineering media
spectacle grows ever more extreme, the US
Olympic Commission has farmed out the development
of its gladiator to a private corporation,
which in turn has given the design of the
beast over to a massive supercomputer which
communicates only with its own designer,
a cripplingly maladjusted (and massively
overweight) near-autistic savant named Evan
Chandler, who has developed a rather pathetic
father-son relationship with the computer’s nascent
AI, which he calls ‘‘Pea.’’ This is a bit
less subtle than normal suspension of disbelief;
it’s willfully ignoring neon signs flashing
BAD IDEA all over the first half of the plot
– a mentally unbalanced isolate designing an
equally mentally unbalanced AI which in turn
designs a monster which the US Government
is cheerfully willing to set loose in an arena
packed with spectators, even though it has
no idea what it actually is. The monster itself
is pretty spectacular – a winged monstrosity
something like one of A.E. Van Vogt’s black
destroyers before Giger got hold of them – but
Kosmatka pays little attention to outlining the
decadent, almost dystopian culture that would
even tolerate such events (there’s a protest
movement, but it serves little role other than
as snack food). Instead, we have a distressingly
familiar build-up of tension between the
clueless venal corporate overlord (he might as
well be the mayor of Amity Island) and the
dedicated genetic scientist who, with his newfound
girlfriend (an exobiologist hired for the
project to try to determine the nature of the
monster) fighting to prevent the inevitable disaster,
which involves familiar images from
steel containment doors being beaten open
from the inside to spectators tossed about like
popcorn, and a world-threatening apocalypse
in the offing.
Kosmatka shows that he can write an effective
thriller leavened with some knowledgeable
genetic engineering and AI theory, but the
qualities that have made him such a distinctive
story writer tend to lie around the margins of
this by-the-numbers plot: in the sad scenes
between the reclusive Evan Chandler and his
immature AI, in the portrayal of the decent
but haunted genetic scientist Silas Williams,
even in such touches as a funeral scene following
the death of the monster’s first victim
(how many victims in disaster thrillers ever
get funerals?), and in a rather unexpectedly
moving conclusion. This may not be the novel
that Kosmatka’s short fiction would lead us to
expect, but who’s to blame him for taking the
Michael Crichton route, especially since he almost
certainly handles the material in a more
sophisticated and less silly way that Crichton
himself would have? The Games may not be
as original as we know Kosmatka can be, and
it may not even be about the Games of its title,
but it’s an efficient thriller that does what it
sets out to do, and promises a good deal more
in the future.
When SF writers take to non-fiction, the result
can be sometimes a little like taking an
elegant clock apart to examine the workings,
as when a Stephen Baxter or a Greg Egan reveal
the underlying specs of their own invented
worlds, and sometimes like listening to the
smartest kid in class explaining why he’s the
smartest kid in class, and why we’re all way
behind on the curve and probably thinking
about the wrong things entirely. If anyone has
a solid claim to uncovering the ways in which
the future is embedded in the present it’s William
Gibson, and yet the occasional essays
collected in Distrust That Particular Flavor
are not in the slightest supercilious in tone. Instead,
we repeatedly get to share in the sense
of wonder and discovery that Gibson himself
seems to feel when first encountering everything
from Zombies of the Stratosphere (in
a fascinating piece on cyborgs that also somehow
segues into Vannevar Bush, whose 1945
article describing what amounts to a personal
computer is one of Gibson’s more fascinating
discoveries) to eBay (in an account of his former
obsession with watch-collecting) to the
myriad fascinations that contemporary Japan
holds for him. Gibson has developed into a
major novelist over the last few decades (Neuromancer,
while still impressive, often seems
crude in comparison to the subtleties of his recent
Pattern Recognition trilogy), but at heart
he’s an artist of implications, following the
ripples of the most mundane notions – being
a ‘‘picker’’ of resaleable goods in thrift shops,
listening to Chubby Checker on a ‘‘Rocket Radio’’
(a 1950s kids’ radio which operated without
a power supply) – until he uncovers unexpected
cultural and historical meanings. He’s
the only writer I know who would compare
Steely Dan to the building of the first atomic
pile at the University of Chicago, or Borges to
bandwidth-enhancing software.
When Gibson writes about literature, as in
the piece on Borges or others on H.G. Wells
and George Orwell, his characteristic tone
mixes personal appreciation with sharp historical
insight. When he writes about his own
life or fiction, such as in his website autobiographical
essay ‘‘After 1948’’ or in a piece
called ‘‘Time Machine Cuba’’, he’s remarkably
at ease and unaffected. The latter piece,
which is likely to be of greatest interest to Gibson
fans and SF readers, describes his simultaneous
discovery of SF and twentieth century
history through an old Classics Illustrated
comic book and later H.G. Wells, and goes a
fair way toward explaining how Gibson came
to view SF and history as extensions of each
other. Probably the most powerful piece in the
book, though, is one that almost reads like a Gibson
story: ‘‘Disneyland with the Death Penalty’’,
originally from Wired magazine, is a chilling
and oddly funny account of a 1993 visit to Singapore
– ‘‘like an entire country run by Jeffrey
Katzenberg,’’ as an unnamed producer warns
him – where the obsessive neatness matched
with news accounts of death penalties for even
inadvertent or small-time drug smugglers grow
more and more ominous until he catches the next
flight to Hong Kong in a state approaching panic.
It’s a little gem of dystopian non-fiction. Rather
amazingly, Gibson hasn’t won a Hugo Award
since Neuromancer – though he’s arguably
moved on to other arenas – but the fact that this
piece got Wired banned by the Singaporean government
should be honor enough for any writer
doing his business and doing it well.
–Gary K. Wolfe �
THIS MONTH IN HISTORY
February 4, 2054. Good behavior. Faithful
rejoice as Pope Gregory-Yang is released
after serving only six months of his 12-year
sentence as an accessory to child abuse.
LOCUS February 2012 / 17

locus looks aT books: Faren miller �
The Courier’s New Bicycle, Kim Westwood
(Harper Voyager [Australia] 978-0-7322-8988-1,
A$24.99, 328pp, pb) August 2011.
Everything Is Broken, John Shirley (Prime
978-1-60701-292-4, $14.95, 284pp, tp) February
2012. [Order from www.prime-books.com].
The Folded World, Catherynne M. Valente
(Night Shade 978-1-59780-203-1, $14.99,
272pp, tp) November 2011. [Order from Night
Shade Books, 1661 Tennessee St. #3H, San
Francisco CA 94107; .]
The Emperor’s Knife, Mazarkis Williams (Jo
Fletcher Books 978-0857-38800-1, £14.99, tp)
November 2011. (Night Shade 978-1-59780-
384-7, $24.99, 350pp, hc) December 2011.
Cover by Chris Shamwana.
Somewhere Beneath Those Waves, Sarah
Monette (Prime 978-1-60701-305-1, $14.95,
336pp, tp) November 2011. Cover by Elena
Dudina.
The Courier’s New Bicycle, Kim Westwood’s
second novel, manages to find life and (intentionally
weird) sources of hope in a future Australia
still reeling from a string of disasters. Ten years
after a dangerous flu pandemic whose vaccine’s
unforeseen side effect was widespread infertility,
an extreme political backlash against all
things scientific has placed power in the hands
of Christian fundamentalist party Nation First,
whose strict laws are enforced on the local level
by bands like violent street gangs.
According to official doctrine, faith is the only
answer to the plagues that have been visited upon
a sinning nation. Some of these transgressions
are what our world would call forms of sexual
deviance. Others have mildly futuristic qualities,
like the lingering results of a fad for gene-spliced
pets. And then there are the scientists who still
ply their trade, now banished to the Red Zone
where they join the drug-lords, whorehouse madams,
and others who go about their business just
beyond the reach of the Law. As a transgendered
woman who feels (and loves) more like a male,
and as the owner of a glowing purple cat, and
courier for banned experimental substances, this
book’s first-person present-tense narrator could
18 / LOCUS February 2012
almost be the poster child for Unsanctity.
Yet when a series of murders creates a need
for private sleuthing, this quirky individual with
the equally odd name of Salisbury Forth refuses
to play hero(ine). Despite working for the most
morally responsible in the current bunch of hormone-sellers,
Salisbury sums up the job without
false sentiment: ‘‘Gail sells fertility hormones –
‘kit’, once legal, now banned – which makes me
a midnight postie, a courier of secret packages...
and sometimes, under sufferance, a snoop.’’
Faced with increasingly dangerous assignments
and a jumble of clues s/he can’t seem to
make sense of, this snoop may seem entirely
outmatched by the ruthless, anonymous foes
who want to destroy or take over Gail’s business.
Away from the job, Salisbury does get
involved in some minor acts of rebellion. One
random encounter with a gang of pious thugs and
their victim, a surrogate mother, rouses enough
adrenaline to trigger a desperate intervention.
During a far more deliberate, carefully planned
rescue (working with a group of animal activists
to free horses from a deadly hormone factory),
our narrator still feels marginal. When one
injured creature fails to survive, ‘‘Agonised, I
hover at the edge....’’
But neither the individual nor a badly damaged
world will just give up and shut up, surrendering
to the enemies of free thought, free love, and
honest (if illegal) enterprise. Even as one affair
falters, Salisbury’s passion for other women
remains as clear as it is shameless. For real
crime, look to those citizens who profess absolute
obedience while, safe in the shadows, they
experiment with the latest pills, hire a mother
for engineered offspring, or plan to lord it over
the whole unauthorized shebang.
When the plot strings tighten, and apparent
happenstance takes on something more like the
tragic sense of destiny in one family’s doom, the
reluctant snoop embarks upon a kind of quest
without assuming any false airs. When all is said
and done, the courier remains down-to-earth,
randy, irreverent towards everything, including
an androgynous (now somewhat battle-scarred)
self, and only too happy to let others take the
accolades and honors – especially if modesty’s
reward is a brand-new bicycle.
With a title taken from a Bob Dylan song
and epigraphs from The Bhagavad Gita, John
Shirley’s Everything Is Broken might seem
like a natural for his own stomping ground, the
San Francisco Bay Area. One young character,
who spent the last two years ‘‘vaguely majoring
in English’’ back in Akron OH while living
with his mom, could have been drawn toward
Berkeley. But Russ accepts an invitation from
his dad, lured by the promise of a job in the tiny
burg of Freedom, California. In this book’s dire
near-future, such hopes will swiftly vanish.
Even before a massive tsunami nearly levels
this (invented) town on the northern coast,
the Prologue sounds a warning with its opening
rant: ‘‘My name is Dickie Rockwell and I
fucking rule Freedom, California!’’ Like some
foulmouthed version of a mad king from the
pen of Shakespeare, Dickie’s screams may be
addressed less to his scraggly band of followers
than to his perceived equal and rival, ‘‘the cold
October sea.’’ And yet, not long after the murder
of one man which ends this scene, the ocean
strikes with a ferocity that slaughters thousands.
Freedom is woefully unprepared for disaster.
Lou Ferrara, the bar owner and mayor who
gave it that name to trumpet his own (radically
anti-government) philosophy, has ditched the
fire department, slashed the police force down
to almost nothing, and considers any offers of
help from the outside world as signs of foul
conspiracy against him. Mingling Tea-Party
paranoia with the hubris of a Mafia don, Lou
can resemble a comedic take on the Far Right –
though both he and fellow villain Dickie reveal
enough dark baggage, in the course of the tale,
to become almost tragic.
The tsunami doesn’t just provide excuses for
political satire. Shirley dives headlong into disaster-epic
mode: fast-paced, brutal, heavily-armed
and compulsively readable. As the viewpoint
ranges among his cast (aside from Russ as the
naive outsider, there’s a slacker, an aging hippie,
a hapless Goth girl raised by fundamentalists,
several oddballs who may be solid citizens at
heart, and more than one kind of nutcase), each
brings a personal slant to the desolation around
them. Is it the end of the world called down by
an enraged Jehovah, the perfect opportunity for
massive self-indulgence amid the last scraps of
the good life, confirmation that the System sucks,
or a trial that might have positive results if one
can only summon the inner strength to do what
must be done? All this and more.

Even for the lucky or determined ones who
manage to survive both nature and their fellow
man, things can still get worse. One rather ditsy
female describes their current situation in terms
of ‘‘scary movies’’:
See, the story wouldn’t be any good if it just
started with the monster killing everyone,
you got to set them up. I mean, in some movies
they give you a sample killing out in front
but not for the hero. And that’s what the world
is. The world starts out pretty okay for most
people, and then they get sick or beat up
or tortured or else just trapped somewhere
and... die all disappointed.
She concludes dismally, ‘‘the part where
things are good is gone for us, ... and now we’re
in the killing and killing part that the demons
like.’’
Everything Is Broken combines that formula
(complete with an initial ‘‘sample killing’’), with
displays of the more upbeat, macho attitude
where evil can be vanquished – as long as some
scared newbie finally manages to pull the trigger.
Both responses seem thoroughly American.
But the book’s coda comes from one of Conan
Doyle’s tales of quintessentially English sleuth
Sherlock Holmes, as he ponders life’s ‘‘circle
of misery and violence and fear.’’ There must be
some sense to it, ‘‘or else our universe is ruled
by chance, which is unthinkable.’’
The great solver of mysteries can only conclude,
‘‘There is the great standing perennial
problem to which human reason is as far from an
answer as ever.’’ After another century of horrors
old and new, the challenge lingers.
Despite its gloomy title, A Dirge For Prester
John, Catherynne M. Valente’s new series is
too gloriously odd and laced with irony to fit
comfortably among Dark Fantasies. It began
with The Habitation of the Blessed (reviewed
in issue #599), where an earnest, post-medieval
Christian scholar’s pursuit of truths behind the
centuries-old legend of Prester John’s unlikely
travels through an Orient of bizarre cultures
and Boschian monsters, became a collage of
three tales from that past – plucked from a
magical ‘‘book tree’’ near the Indus River. Like
any other fruit, such volumes tend to rot in the
humid climate, yet Hiob the scholar would not
forsake his task.
Although he plucks another trio of books in
aptly titled sequel The Folded World, the choice
is not as random as he’d feared. In one, Prester
John provides another daffy travelog sprinkled
with philosophical conversations and curious
lists, now known as ‘‘The Virtue of Things is
in the Midst of Them’’. (A recent New Yorker
piece on modern essayists shows that John’s
mix of fact with wild inventions, plus brief
numbered paragraphs, is still very much alive.)
Hagia, the faceless female narrator of volume
one’s ‘‘Book of the Fountain’’, with hands and
mouth somehow transplanted to the palms of her
hands, graces this volume’s cover and narrates
‘‘The Book of the Ruby’’. And, despite a title
that recalls that cover image, ‘‘The Left-Hand
Mouth, the Right-Hand Eye’’ returns to vol-
ume one’s ‘‘Scarlet Nursery’’, where unusual
attendants serve royal offspring, in a city like
Constantinople still nervously awaiting holy war
– a conflict that should bring Prester John back to
this border with the West in some future volume.
Peculiar, poetic and emotionally direct,
whether the state of mind be fear, frustration,
or the wry serenity of worldly wisdom, The
Folded World also gains a surprising amount
of momentum as Hiob the scholar pursues the
course of history in these new texts. The wit
running through the maze (like some impish
Ariadne) may not quite lead him free of it, but
readers can find a way home.
Valente’s convoluted world reflects ours, to
the point where comments by one not-entirelyhuman
female seem like a response to the end
of Shirley’s book, where disaster figures in the
questions raised by Holmes. Instead of the orthodox
notion of God (in which both Hiob and
Prester John believe, though Conan Doyle’s
sleuth may feel a twinge of doubt) – she proposes
this:
God is a random event, a nexus of pain and
pleasure and making and breaking. It has
no sense of timing. It does not obey nice
narratives like: a child is born, he grows,
he performs miracles.... God is a sphere,
and only rarely does it intersect with us –
and when it does, it crashes, it cracks the
surface of everything. It does not part the
sea at just the right time. God is too big for
such precision.
Such a passage should appeal to lovers of
fantasy and SF, as well as anyone still seeking
truth through metaphysics.
The bio on the dust jacket of Mazarkis
Williams’s debut The Emperor’s Knife (first
in a fantasy trilogy) seems deliberately ambiguous
as to the author’s sex, and some brief online
searches didn’t help, so I’ll follow its lead and
refer to this newcomer simply as ‘‘Mazarkis,’’
forgoing the bland surname. Is this minor impediment
to the reviewer a sign of what’s to
come? Well, yes and no.
Mazarkis seems to toy with tradition, opting
for the trilogy form and providing a map of the
Cerani Empire (complete with the familiar fancy
script and pointy mountain ranges). It’s a quasi-
Asian setting of decadent courts, bleak deserts,
perilous djinns, and political conspiracies where
three narratives – converging with no great haste
– introduce a tangle of murder, mad ambition and
a very strange disease. While darkness seems
pervasive, its source is very difficult to trace.
Conventional heroism has no place here. One
viewpoint character has lived nearly all his life
in a ‘‘soft prison,’’ a guarded tower room in the
imperial palace where his brother the Emperor
has confined him with no tutors or companions,
very few visitors, and ample opportunity for
madness. Who is truly more insane: Emperor
Beyon (rumored to be a victim of the unusual
affliction) or Prince Sarmin in his room of silk
and filigrees, where the walls now speak to him?
This isn’t some Man in the Iron Mask, ready to
spring into action when the plot requires it.
Eyul, the assassin who followed Beyon’s di-
rective and killed all the imperial siblings except
for one, still wields the knife and guards his boss
as best he can. But he’s heard enough court gossip
to wonder whether the illness borne by secret
Carriers – which traces abstract patterns on the
flesh while it attacks the soul – hasn’t already
touched the man. And in a court where power
comes not just from inheritance but also from
burning need and the workings of magic, can
any apparent ally be trusted?
The third plotline moves into the wilds where
Mesema, child of nomads, has been chosen as a
bride for Prince Sarmin, according to a scheme
I won’t try to explain. Among the characters
with some magical gift, hers as a ‘‘windreader’’
(capable of seeing meaningful patterns in natural
scenes, and guessing at the meanings behind
these brief glimpses) seems the least touched by
insanity or a lust for worldly things. But what
could this unschooled young woman do, faced
with the baroque weirdness of the court?
Mazarkis hints at further mysteries from the
past, including a lost city which may still be a
source of evil influence. Back in the court, the
identity of the Pattern Master (true villain in this
tricky cast?) seems to shift just when we think
we’ve figured it out. The Emperor’s Knife
manages to slither and creep its way to some
resolutions, in both political gamesmanship
and the intriguing welter of magic and disease.
Just don’t look here for fantastic adventures
shaped by destiny, bold determination, or much
self-awareness.
Introducing Sarah Monette’s collection
Somewhere Beneath Those Waves, Elizabeth
Bear (friend and co-writer with Monette of several
fantasy novels, as well as exchanges of short
fiction on the same themes) discusses some of its
works and workings. Opener ‘‘Draco campestris’’,
set in a museum whose imperial collection
includes a dusty hall of dragons, inspires her to
both musical metaphors and a concept based on
one main character, the skilled taxonomist in
charge of the bones: ‘‘Ony Sarah would build
a love story that way, like a paleontologist assembling
a fossil skeleton, half by guesswork
and half by a profound understanding’’ of the
creatures when they were alive.
The taxonomist inspired more than that simile.
One brief moment – as he turns from a ladder
beside those bones to see ‘‘a tall lady, fair and
haggard, dressed with elegant simplicity’’ – perversely
reminded me of the end of film classic
Bringing Up Baby, where Katherine Hepburn’s
manic/chic rich girl inadvertently topples paleontologist
Cary Grant’s treasured brontosaurus
skeleton. Though ‘‘Draco’’ has no slapstick, let
alone a happy ending, it does show Monette’s
tendency to stray beyond the familiar bounds of
� p. 67
THIS MONTH IN HISTORY
February 11, 2107. Cochin Cola closes
Greenland ice cap. Commodity markets
surge as tap futures top out at E110 a barrel,
a 12-month high.
LOCUS February 2012 / 19

locus looks aT books: russell leTson
The Other, Matthew Hughes (Underland
Press 978-0-9826639-6-7, $15.95, 231 pp,
tp) November 2011. [Order from .]
The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow, Cory
Doctorow (PM Press, 978-1-60486-404-5,
$12.00, 136 pp, tp) November 2011. [Order from
PM Press, PO Box 23912, Oakland, CA 94623;
.]
Matthew Hughes’s Vance-inspired far-future
milieu, the Archonate, is a sprawling metaculture
of ten thousand worlds and their exotic societies,
so distant in time and so ancient in its own
terms that it can be hard to establish relationships
among the stories that share the setting.
Even the genres the Archonate hosts will not
sit still: the purely science-fictional Template
is distinct from the fantastical adventures of
Henghis Hapthorn in Hespira, which take place
at the beginning of a cosmic shift in the laws
governing the entire universe away from the
rational-materialist and toward the magical. It’s
as though the Gaean Reach were to evolve, over
the aeons, in the direction of the Dying Earth.
The Archonate of Hughes’ new novel, The
Other, feels closer to that of Template than to
the magic-infected cosmos of Hapthorn. The
protagonist, Luff Imbry, is a thief, forger, fence,
and voluptuary who combines some traits of
Nero Wolfe and Jonathan Gash’s Lovejoy: a
fat, epicurean criminal with a love of antiquities
and physical comfort, possessed of a sharp
intelligence, a flexible moral code, and a lax
conscience. Imbry is a meticulous and suspicious
hands-on crook, but for all his precautions, he
finds himself kidnapped by persons unknown
for reasons unstated (though payback is suspected)
and transported away from Old Earth
to a planet obscure in location and history and
bizarre in culture.
All Imbry knows is the world’s name, Fulda,
and even after he encounters some of its inhabitants
he has a hard time figuring out exactly what
kind of place it is. The members of the band of
traveling entertainers to which he is delivered
seem unwilling or unable to explain much
about their situation, though the reason for their
reticence eventually becomes clear: in Fulda’s
society they are at the bottom simply because
they depart from the culture’s ideal of uniformity.
Fuldans have made physical and behavioral (and
by extension psychological) adherence to an
ideal ‘‘regularity’’ not so much their highest as
their single goal, and fat, inquisitive, unconventional
(not to say antisocial) Imbry is decidedly
irregular – enough so that his first encounter
with mainstream Fuldan society, in the form of
an Investigator from its Corps of Provosts, ends
with incarceration and a beating. Of course, part
of that might be because what is being investigated
is the strange death of a member of the
entertainment troupe, but Investigator Breeth’s
attitude seems driven by something deeper than
the usual cop hostility toward a suspect.
And that attitude proves to be part of a culturewide
pathology with roots in the exodus that led
to the settling of Fulda millennia earlier and in
�
some even stranger events and forces
that Imbry gradually figures out. In
the meantime, though, he must clear
himself of a murder, pick his way
through a strange and dangerous
culture, and figure a way to get off a
planet that lacks a spaceport and the
usual communications networks – all
the while placating the Fuldan authorities
and dodging the machinations of
whatever person or persons kidnapped
him in the first place. He also notes
various passing puzzlements, such
as the fate of the long-vanished alien
indigenes, the meaning of the odd
ruins they left behind, and the fact
that the Fuldans do not share his curiosity about
the relatively recent, let alone deep history of
their home.
The ruling passion of this one-note dystopia
– a textbook example of what Kingsley Amis
called the ‘‘comic inferno’’ – is not hard for an
experienced reader to figure, though, and the
middle-distance back-story makes for a familiar,
if sourly amusing, parable. The story’s chief
pleasures reside in the scenes in which Imbry
confronts and confounds various Fuldans and
manages to insert his irregular agenda into their
ancient and inflexible regularity. Imbry is quite
the anthropologist – a survival trait, given his
profession. He not only recognizes universal
cop attitudes and behaviors, he is able to piece
together a picture of the culture’s social dynamic
despite the Fuldans’ deep distaste for thinking
outside their own box. For the cosmopolitan
thief, the contents of almost any cultural box
are easy to understand:
Humankind had now been in existence over
a vast span of time, and across that myriad
of millennia every possible permutation and
combination of social orders been tried and
judged. All that needed to be known about
the ways in which societies could be – and
more important should be – organized was
now known.... But sensible people, and
Imbry was nothing if not sensible, knew that
the quest for social perfection was always
misguided. It never failed to produce misery.
The last long section of the book is a kind of
treasure hunt, with Imbry assembling the puzzle
pieces (which fit together in a surprising manner
with only one blank space left) and finding
a way off-planet. And, like many an anti-hero
(and some plain old heroes) in the Vance mold,
he leaves a path of wreckage, psychological and
sometimes literal, along his escape route. In
fact, the whole package is as convincingly and
pleasingly Vancean as Hughes’ earlier Archonate
stories – together they constitute an homage that
manages to maintain its own particular flavor
and sensibility. The way is open for a direct
sequel, though Imbry’s lifestyle does not require
anything so linear and constricting as revenge to
provide future adventures. Still, one wonders
what form his payback might take, and how
much one might cringe (admiringly) to read of it.
The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow is the
Cory Doctorow entry in the PM Press Outspoken
Authors series, each of which bundles fiction and
non-fiction with an interview with the featured
writer. Doctorow’s title novella, reprinted from
a 2010 anthology, is a showcase for an opensource
future in which that philosophy has been
applied to a range of transformational technologies.
The result is a world that is the opposite
of a centrally-planned utopia – not opposite in
that it’s dystopic (well, not conventionally dystopian),
but in that it is so thoroughly bottom-up
and self-organizing. Or self-disorganizing. This
tomorrow is indeed Great-Big insofar as the
enabling technologies and resulting changes are
extensive and even radical, but the Beautiful part
depends entirely on the eyes of the beholders.
And because there are so many beholders, so
many minds and hands working at changing the
world into their versions of heaven, it’s a bit on
the chaotic side.
The narrator, Jimmy Yensid (yes, spell it backwards),
is a boy who will never grow up – or, to
be precise, who will grow up very, very slowly,
because his father designed and built him that
way. The upside is that he is an effectively immortal
transhuman. The downside is that, despite
his considerable intelligence and experience, he
is physiologically and neurologically and thus
emotionally a pre-adolescent, with the judgment
and impulse-control issues that go along with
that developmental stage. When we meet him,
Jimmy is piloting his vintage war mecha and
hunting the robotic heavy-deconstruction equipment
called wumpuses. Jimmy’s transhuman
father sees old Detroit as a kind of vintage-tech
museum or preserve, but the Green enthusiasts
who built and deployed the wumpuses are determined
to turn abandoned urban and industrial
zones back into natural (or perhaps post-natural)
landscapes full of trees and other boring stuff.
So the wumpuses deconstruct old factories and
buildings, and Jimmy and his mecha and his pack
of dog-brained, remote-control drones deconstruct
the wumpuses, and it’s all fun and games
until somebody puts an eye out. Or, to be precise,
until the Greens call in the heavy artillery to apply
a final solution to the Detroit Conservation
Zone and, incidentally, to Jimmy’s dad.
Jimmy escapes with his life, his canned dogbrains,
and the jewel of Dad’s collection, the
Carousel of Progress, a lovingly restored World’s
Fair/Disneyland exhibit featuring a cast of
primitive animatronic robots depicting the past’s
picture of the Great Big Beautiful Future (which
� p. 67
LOCUS February 2012 / 21

locus looks aT books: aDrienne marTini
The Highest Frontier, Joan Slonczewski (Tor
978-0-7653-2956-1, $26.99, 448pp, hc) September
2011.
Seed, Rob Ziegler (Night Shade 978-1-59780-
323-6, $24.99, 300pp, hc) Dec. 2011. Cover by
Cody Tilson. [Order from Night Shade Books,
1661 Tennessee St. #3H, San Francisco CA
94107; .]
The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten, Harrison
Geillor (Night Shade 978-1-59780-284-0,
$14.99, 300, hc) October 2011. Cover by Scott
Altmann.
Cinder, Marissa Meyer (Feiwel and Friends
978-0-312-64189-4, $17.99, 400, hc) January
2012.
The Best of Kage Baker, Kage Baker (Subterranean
978-1-59606-442-3, $40, 496, hc)
April 2012. [Order from Subterranean Press,
PO Box 190106, Burton MI 48519; .]
If you price your books by number of
mind-blowing ideas per page, then Joan
Slonczewski' s The Highest Frontier would
be a bargain at twice the price. Crammed into
this relatively short book are dozens of nifty,
gee-whiz-cool-future geegaws that would
make any science fiction lover swoon. Just in
the first 20 pages, Slonczewski introduces a
Heinlein-esque Beanstalk made from anthrax,
a space habitat powered by bacteria, a plague
of ultraphytes crawling out of the Great Salt
Lake, a worldwide immersive computer network
called Toybox, a magical amyloid that
can be printed into anything you could desire,
a lethal belt of space debris, a Quiddich-like
game called slanball, and a Death Belt around
the center of the planet. This isn’t a comprehensive
list, mind, just a quick skim – and
that’s not including what Slonczewski imagines
for our political system, which has grown
ever more polarized in her version of the future.
We care about politics in Frontier because
the main character, a first-year college student,
Jennifer Ramos Kennedy, is the youngest in
a generations-long political dynasty. She’s being
pressured to join the family business but
would much rather invest her energies in her
�
studies at Frontera, a college that orbits Earth.
Jenny wants to major in Life, which isn’t in the
Philosophy department at Frontera but is instead
what a biology major has morphed into.
Real world events intrude, as you know they
must. Jenny rises to the challenges, as you
know she must. And, no, that’s not a spoiler.
You can see that coming.
What works here is Slonczewski’s complete
visualization of this world. There are details
upon details upon details about how this would
all work. Also, the writer’s own background in
academia streams through when she switches
her POV to that of the instructors and administrators.
As a professor myself, I couldn’t help
but snigger when she mentioned the mighty
power of FERPA and the ‘‘hijinks’’ of undergrads.
But all of that detail is also the book’s downfall.
With so much science, the fiction gets
hard to follow. With the exception of Jenny,
the characters never progress beyond twodimensional
cut-outs who serve to push the
plot along. There also seems to be one subplot
too many, which makes the story’s focus
more like birdshot than a bullet. Along with
everything else, Slonczewski uses her story to
comment on recent events, everything from
the Bush/Gore election, Sarah Palin/Michelle
Bachmann’s candidacy, and even the Katrinaadjacent
Michael D. Brown. After an emergency
on Frontera, ‘‘In Washington, President
Bud congratulated FEMA for ‘doing a heck of
a job’ on the relief effort.’’
All of these nubbins of thought, idea, and
information are great when taken alone. Yet
when so much is packed into one book, the result
feels crammed almost to the point of impenetrability.
A little bit of pruning could have
gone a long way toward making The Highest
Frontier a great read, rather than an adequate
one.
If you are looking for a happy little story
about climate change, corporations, and Secret
Service agents, Rob Ziegler’s Seed is not
it. If, however, you are looking for the stylistic
cousin of Grapes of Wrath, The Road, and
The Wind-Up Girl, Seed is exactly what you
want.
It’s bleak. It’s dark. It’s about resilience and
hope even when you have no good reason to
have either. It’s also gorgeously written and
exquisitely visualized. Rob Ziegler’s version
of the 22nd-century US feels like it just could
happen.
Seed-corporation Satori – think futuristic
Monsanto – controls all of the agricultural
products that can be grown. Their single-use,
bar-coded seed has been adapted by Satori’s
not-quite-human-anymore designers to grow
in a world whose climate has gone mad. Satori
has also built a living, sentient city whose will
is controlled by four ‘‘Fathers,’’ the sort-of
zombified remnants of the corporation’s board
of directors.
Also in play are the bands of refugees who
eke out a meagre living from the dust, mostly
through armed robbery and black market
trade. It’s a brutal existence, one where death
waits impatiently. Zeigler focuses his lens on
Brood, a young man/boy who is crossing the
country with his savant brother after their
mother has died.
‘‘Momma prayed,’’ Brood said. She’d
prayed incessantly at the end. Staring up
at the empty white sky, watching day turn
into night and back again. Fever’d burned
through her, beading her skin with sweat
and turning it yellow as the Oklahoma
hardpan on which she’d lain. Her mouth
had been stretched open when Brood
had awakened that final morning. He face
wrapped her skull like leather, as though
her last breath had pulled taut a thread,
drawing her flesh tight as it escaped.
She’d bloated in the heat. Her eyes had
milked over and flies covered them.
Zeigler creates the sort of landscape where
the reader wouldn’t be terribly surprised if the
brothers walked past a baby on a spit over a
fire, but, somehow, there’s an ineffable lightness
to his writing, which makes the reading
less difficult even when the images are searing.
Also on Seed’s stage is former Army Ranger
Sienna Doss, a badass chick tasked with
protecting the interests of a government that
is buried in Satori’s pockets. When one of
� p. 67
THIS MONTH IN HISTORY
February 24, 2112. SeaWorld © buys Bagram.
The former US airbase and detention center
is scheduled to reopen May 1 with ‘‘enhanced’’
torture exhibits rivaling Cuba’s popular Guantanamo
theme park.
LOCUS February 2012 / 23

locus looks aT books: sTeFan DziemianoWicz
The Doll: The Lost Short Stories, Daphne du
Maurier (Cemetery Dance 978-158767-273-6,
$25.00, 250p, hc), December 2011. [Order from
Cemetery Dance Publications, 132-B Industry
Lane, Unit #7, Forest Hill MD 21050; .] (Morrow
978-006208-034-9, $14.99, 224p, tp) December
2011.
The Hunter from the Woods, Robert R. Mc-
Cammon (Subterranean 978-1-59606-413-3,
$75.00, 328p, hc) December 2011. [Order from
Subterranean Press, PO Box 190106, Burton MI
48519; .]
Shadows West, Joe R. Lansdale & John R.
Lansdale (Subterranean 978-1-59606-432-4,
$50.00, 424p, hc) January 2012.
Cemetery Dance, a publisher that specializes
in horror fiction, is bringing out a limited
hardcover edition of this new collection of old
stories by Daphne du Maurier simultaneous
with its trade paperback incarnation. That might
give the impression that this is a book of weird
tales, and why not? Du Maurier is the author
of a handful of top-notch tales of the macabre,
among them ‘‘The Birds’’ (filmed memorably
by Alfred Hitchcock) and ‘‘Don’t Look Now’’
(filmed memorably by Nicholas Roeg), all of
which were gathered for her 1987 collection
Classics of the Macabre. But though she is
remembered today largely for these works and
her modern gothic Rebecca (also filmed by
Hitchcock), in her lifetime the macabre was just
one area of fiction in which she dabbled. Her
short-fiction collections mixed her weird work
with her mainstream tales, and such is the case
with The Doll, a selection of 13 stories written
between 1926 and 1932 (and in some cases
published many years later), most of which have
not seen book publication in America and only
a few of which court the weird.
The majority of the stories are character studies
or slice-of-life episodes in which characters
pull away from relationships where love has
gone stale or shown no grounds for continuing
beyond an initial infatuation. Though
competently written, they are predictable and
read very much as what they are – the work
of a young writer trying to develop her own
voice and occasionally writing on subjects she
has little familiarity with (as in ‘‘Piccadilly,’’
about how a young woman is lured into a life
of thievery and prostitution). ‘‘And Now to God
the Father’’ (du Maurier’s first published story),
about a hypocritical cleric who massages social
situations in his parish to benefit himself at the
expense of his less important parishioners, and
‘‘The Limpet’’, in which a devious woman uses
passive-aggressive manipulation from childhood
on to get her way, are nearly as obvious in their
telling as the tale ‘‘His Letters Grew Colder’’
is in its title.
A few stories stand out from this otherwise
undistinguished pack. ‘‘East Wind’’, about an
insular and inbred island community whose
everyday placidness is disrupted by the arrival
of a ship from the outside world, reads like an
allegory or fable of the fall from innocence into
a world of corrupting experience. The title tale
relies on the old contrivance of the found diary
with pages that are either missing or smudged
to illegibility at key plot points, but its account
of a young man driven to suicide by his discovery
that an eccentric musician with whom
he is obsessed can respond amorously only
to a grotesque mechanical doll that she keeps
locked up in her apartment has a strange and
perverse spirit that sets it apart from the book’s
more conventional stories of thwarted romance.
The best story by far is ‘‘The Happy Valley’’, a
work whose comparative maturity suggests that
it may have been the one written latest. The tale
of a woman whose premonitory dreams build to
a suggestively morbid climax, it blends dream
and reality in an unsettling way that anticipates
the ambiguous interplay of ordinary and the
supernatural in du Maurier’s masterpiece of the
weird, ‘‘Don’t Look Now’’. In contrast to the rest
of the contents, there’s not an unnecessary word
or forced situation in the story, and its writing
is evocative and eerie. It might be going too far
to say that this story alone is worth the price of
the book, but Ann Willmore, who is credited
with having alerted the du Maurier estate to
these largely forgotten tales, is to be thanked
for calling attention to at least one work that
should become a staple of future anthologies of
macabre fiction.
When last we saw Michael Gallatin – an officer
and a werewolf – he was busy advancing
the Allied cause against the Nazis in Robert R.
McCammon’s 1989 novel The Wolf’s Hour.
That novel was one of the better efforts in a
�
subgenre of horror that pits creatures whom we
would normally associate with supernatural evil
against humans so irredeemably vile that the
supernatural beings look benevolent by comparison.
Gallatin is the hero of a new collection of
six stories, The Hunter from the Woods, and
most of them are related at least tangentially to
his novel-length wartime adventure.
You don’t have to have read The Wolf’s Hour
to appreciate these shorter works, though the
novel does provide backstory that it takes a while
to piece together from the individual tales. Gallatin
is not your garden-variety werewolf. Born
Mikhail Gallatinov in Russia in the early part
of the 20th century, he was bitten by a werewolf
as a boy and endowed with the ability to shapeshift
(or open his ‘‘soul cage,’’ as McCammon
describes it) virtually at will, independent of the
lunar cycle. He has the lady-killing good looks
that are normally reserved for vampires, and a
Byronic world-weariness that comes from too
many experiences where he had to shed blood
to save his own life.
The stories are organized in chronological
order of their events, and they form an episodic
counterpart to the cross-cutting between past and
present events that distinguishes the narrative of
The Wolf’s Hour. The first, ‘‘The Great White
Way’’, is an origin story of sorts that has Michael
(as Mikhail) traveling with a circus through rural
Russia in 1927, and being pitted by his lover
against her abusive husband, the circus strongman,
with predictably gory results. It’s a slight
tale that nonetheless establishes Mikhail’s reputation
as a gallant with the women. ‘‘The Man
from London’’ expands on Michael’s character
as a compassionate individual who wants to do
well by those whom he can help. It introduces
Michael’s mentor, William Bartlett, an officer in
the British secret service, who is unsuccessful at
persuading Michael to leave the small Russian
town whose people he hunts game for, until a
ruthless Russian army regiment forces Michael
to exert his formidable protective powers and
helps to convince him that a greater destiny with
more profound heroism awaits him.
The novella ‘‘Sea Chase’’ is the first story to
feature Michael serving British Intelligence.
Set one year before the formal start of WWII,
it puts him on board a cargo ship in the North
Sea, covertly providing protection for a German
weapons specialist and his family who are flee-
� p. 68
LOCUS February 2012 / 25

shorT revieWs by carolyn cushman �
Kelly Barnhill, The Mostly True Story of Jack
(Little, Brown 978-0-316-05670-0, $16.99,
219pp, hc) August 2011. Cover by Julene Harrison.
I’m getting to this middle-grade fantasy a bit
late, but as we consider books for the end-of-theyear
recommendations, this slightly quirky story
demands attention. Jack is one of those kids who
feel invisible, but it quickly becomes clear it’s
not all in his head – he’s not in any of the family
photos, his parents hardly seem to realize he
exists, and now that his parents are separating,
he’s being sent to Iowa to live with relatives he’s
never met. But some things about the town of
Hazelwood are strangely familiar, while others
are just strange – other kids actually notice him!
And the richest man in town is very upset at his
arrival. It’s up to Jack to explore the town, get to
know some of the kids, figure out what’s going
on, and save the day – but it’s not the usual sort
of world-saving, as wild magic and elements out
of faerie tales get twisted about ingeniously in
a striking tale about bargains and balance, sacrifice,
friendship, family, and, above all, choice.
Carol Berg, The Daemon Prism (Roc 978-0-
451-46434-7, $16.00, 482pp, tp) January 2012.
The irascible mage Dante takes center stage in
this third and final novel of the Collegia Magica.
A visit from a soldier having disturbing dreams
causes Dante to take off on an investigation
while his ‘‘student’’ Anne de Vernase is away
helping her family. Currently blind, Dante needs
assistance to travel, and recruits courtier Ilario de
Sylvae; considerable humor comes from waiting
for Dante to realize Ilario is not the vapid fool he
seems. Dante’s investigation requires a visit to
his estranged family, leading to some dark revelations
about Dante’s past, which is traumatic
enough, but there are also physical attacks, and
Dante comes to realize that everything is related
to events in the previous books, and his only
friend, Portier du Duplais, is in grave danger
– but before he can warn anyone he’s captured
and tortured by enemies who want his help. It all
turns out to be part of a War for Heaven (intriguingly
skewed from the Christian version, with a
touch of the Prometheus myth), an epic struggle
for which Dante finds a drastic resolution that
changes everything. It’s a complex and intriguing
conclusion, finishing this engaging trilogy with
a welcome touch of hope – if leaving me with a
feeling of wanting more.
Elizabeth C. Bunce, Liar’s Moon (Scholastic/
Levine 978-0-545-13608-2, $17.99, 356pp, hc)
November 2011. Cover by Juliana Kolesova.
The thief Digger is back to her old life in
the city of Gerse in this young-adult fantasy
sequel to Starcrossed. Then she unexpectedly
gets arrested and ends up in a cell with a young
nobleman: Durrel Decath, who saved her life.
He’s in jail for murdering his wife, a member of
a wealthy and powerful merchant family, but he
claims to be innocent. Digger is soon released
and starts trying to figure out what’s going on,
whether magic is involved, and if any of the
tangle she uncovers is related to the war building
between the heirs to the kingdom. Murder mys-
tery, rebellion, and just a hint of romance mix in
most entertaining fashion, though warfare stays
mostly offstage – and a seemingly happy ending
unexpectedly turns into a major cliffhanger.
Tami Dane, Blood of Eden (Kensington 978-0-
7582-6709-2, $7.99, 344pp, pb) December 2011.
This engaging start to a new urban fantasy
series has some probability problems, but if you
can suspend disbelief, it’s great fun. Sloan Skye
has gotten an intership at the FBI, but not the sort
she dreams of – she’s been assigned to the new
Paranormal Behavioral Analysis Unit, which is
understaffed enough to send an untried intern
into the field, checking out strange deaths for
possible vampire involvement. Sloane doesn’t
believe in the supernatural, but she really wants
to work for the FBI, and she’s a genius with a
vast fund of knowledge, if limited social skills.
Oddball characters keep things amusing; her
roommate is chemistry-accident prone and her
mother is insane, so dealing with a series of
improbable deaths is nothing for her, though
dealing with hunky agent J.T. and annoying
fellow intern Gabe can be a problem. It takes
a while, but things get quite supernatural by
the end – improbably so, with some revelations
that are inadequately set up. If you like heavily
researched procedurals or totally convincing
paranormal worldbuilding, this isn’t the book for
you, but the quirky characters, fast pacing, and
touches of humor make up for a lot.
Laura Anne Gilman, Tricks of the Trade
(Luna 978-0-373-80331-6, $14.95, 345pp, tp)
December 2011.
The young PUPIs have two cases to solve
this time, and a dangerous character called The
Roblin has come to town, but the real focus for
this third book in the Paranormal Scene Investigations
series is Bonnie’s relationship with her
boss, Ben Venec. The two have been hit with the
Merge, a magical connection that’s supposed to
be a sign of soulmates, but neither wants anything
to do with it. They’re too independent, and
a relationship would be inappropriate for work,
but with their magic tangled they’re constantly
aware of each other. Way too much time is spent
worrying about the Merge instead of the cases,
but there are some entertaining developments.
Fans of the related Retrievers series in particular
will want to see Bonnie’s first encounter with
Wren Valere.
Gini Koch, alien Proliferation (DAW 978-0-
7564-0697-4, $7.99, 458pp, pb) December 2011.
Cover by Daniel Dos Santos.
Katherine ‘‘Kitty’’ Katt-Martini is back and
helping those aliens from Alpha-Centauri proliferate
– she and her hunky A-C husband Jeff
are expecting their first child any minute, with
all the horrors of baby showers and family gettogethers
that implies. But of course, new threats
to the planet immediately turn up, and it takes
Kitty to put together the strange musical clues
and uncover the villains and their schemes. The
plot gets so convoluted I couldn’t follow all the
twists and turns, or tell whether Kitty’s frequent
this isn’t a serious book you read for the hard
science – and no matter how improbable things
get, the intense pace and constant humor make
for a thoroughly fun read.
Mercedes Lackey, Beauty and the Werewolf
(Luna 978-0-373-80328-6, $24.95, 329pp, hc)
November 2011.
‘‘Little Red Riding Hood’’ meets ‘‘Beauty and
the Beast’’ in this lastest fantasy novel in the 500
Kingdoms series. Bella’s an intelligent young
woman who wants to avoid the many pitfalls the
Tradition puts in her path as a merchant’s eldest
daughter with a stepmother and stepsisters; she’s
avoided the Cinderella story, but there are other
stories to look out for. Then one day, on a visit
to to get advice from the local wisewoman in the
woods – known as ‘‘Granny’’ – Bella gets bitten
by a wolf who turns out to be a nobleman, Duke
Sebastian, under a werewolf curse. Until they
know whether Bella will become a werewolf,
too, she’s forced to stay at the Duke’s castle,
where the Duke and his woodsman are the only
company. Bella’s a strong character, particularly
engaging as she repeatedly confounds the men
and the Tradition and builds her own kind of
story (including romance). There aren’t a lot of
surprises to the plot, but it’s fun watching the
story play out its many variations on familiar
tales.
Lucy A. Snyder, Switchblade Goddess (Del Rey
978-0-345-51211-6, $7.99, 323pp, pb) January
2012. Cover by Dan Dos Santos.
Jessie Shimmer’s third outing takes a look at
the dark side of family ties with some hardcore
horror and only a little leavening from goofy
humor. Jessie and her friends saved the town
of Cuchillo, Texas from the Japanese demon/
demi-goddess Miko in Shotgun Sorceress,
but now they’ve got a lot of cleaning up to do.
Miko is defeated, but not gone; Jessie’s familiar
Pal is badly hurt; the powerful Virtus Regnum
still wants Jessie dead; and Jessie, her boyfriend
Cooper, and his brother the Warlock have to
deal with the terrible things Miko made them
do to each other. But for the first time Jessie
has family to help out – her newly discovered
half-brother Randall and her birth father, the
notorious necromancer Magus Shimmer, a vastly
powerful mage who can certainly help – if Jessie
can just survive Miko’s revenge long enough to
meet him. All together, it makes for a fast-paced,
dark-edged romp with a bit of a fairy-tale ending
– a suspicious sign that things are about to
go very, very wrong....
Maria V. Snyder, Touch of Power (Mira 978-0-
7783-1307-6, $14.95, 392pp, tp) January 2012.
The healer Avry is on the run because she
can’t bring herself to stop healing. In a bit of
a fantasy twist in this first book in the Healer
series, healers are reviled in this world, accused
of spreading the plague that has destroyed the
Fifteen Realms. Avry is fleeing bounty hunters
when she stumbles on a group of fighters desperate
for a healer to cure their plague-struck prince.
Despite Avry’s refusal to help, they carry her
rapid-fire explanations really made sense, but � p. 69
LOCUS February 2012 / 27

locus looks aT books: Divers hanDs
RICHaRD a. LUPOFF
Chariots of San Fernando and Other Stories:
The Best of Malcolm Jameson: Volume
1 (Dancing Tuatara 978-1605435909, $35.00,
314pp, hc) September 2011. [Order from Ramble
House, 10329 Sheephead Drive, Vancleave
MS 39565; .]
Maybe this is a generational thing. If you’re a
grayhead like me, the name Malcolm Jameson
will evoke a wistful smile. I read his stuff when
I was a kid. He was really good. Gee, hadn’t
thought of Malcolm Jameson in decades. Wonder
whatever became of him.
In fact Jameson was one of John W. Campbell’s
first ‘‘finds’’ and one of the authors
Campbell featured regularly in Astounding
and Unknown. Born in 1891, Jameson started a
career as a naval officer only to be discharged
for medical reasons. He tried his hand at writing
fiction relatively late in life, his first story, the
luridly named ‘‘Eviction by Isotherm’’, appearing
in Astounding for August 1938.
In a career cut short by his death in 1945,
Jameson sold approximately 77 stories, ranging
in length from vignettes or short-shorts to
short novels. In addition to Campbell’s magazines,
Jameson’s stories appeared in Thrilling
Wonder Stories, Weird Tales, Startling Stories,
and Super Science Stories. His most famous
series, a sort of Hornblower in outer space,
were collected after his death by Andre Norton
and published as Bullard of the Space Patrol.
This new collection, compiled by John Pelan,
opens perhaps ironically with ‘‘Chariots of San
Fernando’’, Jameson’s last published work. It ran
in Weird Tales for January 1946, nearly a year
after Jameson’s death. In this reviewer’s opinion,
it is one of Jameson’s less noteworthy works.
Its plot is simple: explorers encounter a very
strange, quasi-human species in a tropical rain
forest, flee for their lives, and make it back to
civilization to tell their tale. Certainly the story
deserves points for Jameson’s description of one
of the weirdest (and farthest-fetched) imaginary
species of all time.
Some of Jameson’s stories stretch the definition
of science fiction about as far as I have ever
seen it stretched. ‘‘Children of the ‘Betsy B’’’
deals with a ship that develops consciousness of
its own and begins improving and enlarging itself,
and then starts giving birth to smaller ships.
‘‘The Old Ones Hear’’ is a pure fantasy
involving the survival of the Greek deities into
28 / LOCUS February 2012
�
modern times. But with ‘‘Pride’’, Jameson turns
to a classic science fictional trope: the intelligent,
self-aware robot’s struggle to achieve
autonomy and respect. In our latter-day world
of computers embedded in wristwatches and
i-everythings, these stories may seem a little
bit creaky, but in their day, Otto Binder, Isaac
Asimov, Lester del Rey, and Eric Frank Russell
developed them into a major sub-genre.
‘‘Fighters Never Quit’’ may also feel like a
story out of another era, which of course it is.
It’s a piece of jingoistic war propaganda in which
the ghosts of American sailors go on fighting
the ghosts of their Japanese opponents in the
Pacific Ocean. It’s the kind of story that makes
the reader squirm in this era of political correctness
and universal brother-and-sisterhood, but in
1942 it harmonized with the spirit of the times.
But now we come to the strongest entry in the
present book, a trio of stories involving the use
of time travel to retrieve lost artifacts from the
past. The effort is controlled by a profit-making
corporation, something out of a Kendall Foster
Crossen pipedream. As the series proceeds,
Jameson works wonders with anachronism and
paradox. A total joy – tripled!
‘‘Sand’’ is a cross-genre detective story
involving serial murders on Mars. ‘‘Not According
to Dante’’ is another pure fantasy that
Robert Bloch might have conceived in an inspired
moment. And ‘‘Train to Flushing’’ takes
the reader on a nightmarish ride in a subway car
that seems to travel forever in defiance of the
laws of time and space. Tom Lehrer, take note!
Pelan closes this book on another high note,
Jameson’s story ‘‘Doubled and Redoubled’’.
Originally published in Unknown for February,
1941, it has been suggested that this was the first
use of the ‘‘time loop’’ or ‘‘time bounce’’ theme
in a work of fiction. Jameson’s protagonist,
Jimmy Childers, keeps waking up to the same
morning, over and over, and over. He relives
Thursday, June 14, endlessly. He tries to change
the events of the day and manages to do so – to
an extent – but when he awakens the next morning
it’s Friday, June 14, 1940. A reader familiar
with later examples of this trope may be startled
to read the following passage:
He had a very queer feeling as he went
through the portals – the uncomfortable
sensation of having done it all before. His
upward glance at the clock and the fact
that exactly 12:03 registered in his memory
was a part of it. But he nerved himself for
the ordeal and went straight to his usual
teller’s window.
Indeed he did!
With an easy, naturalistic style worthy of a
Heinlein and a quirkiness comparable to that
of Philip K. Dick, Malcolm Jameson is a major
rediscovery. Kudos to John Pelan for assembling
this book and bringing these stories back into
print.
There are a dozen stories in this book, so there
should be enough material available for several
more volumes of Malcolm Jameson’s fiction.
Pelan has announced a series of collections comparable
to the present one, featuring the works
of Richard Wilson, Robert F. Young, and other
unjustly forgotten science fiction veterans of the
late pulp era. If the other books in the series are
even remotely as enjoyable as this one, I’ll be
waiting beside my mailbox for my copies.
–Richard A. Lupoff
TIM PRaTT
The Mirage, Matt Ruff (Harper 978-0-06-
197622-3, $25.99, 432pp, hc) February 2012.
You never know what to expect from Matt
Ruff. His books run the gamut from contemporary
fantasy to gonzo SF to mainstream
psychological literature, but they all share a
biting sense of humor, an abiding humanity, and
certain recurring themes – notably the fact that
good intentions do not assure good outcomes.
The Mirage shares all those qualities, but
as always, Ruff leads us into new territory as
well. The essential premise of The Mirage is
this: what if fundamentalist Christian terrorists
from a backwater holdfast in North America
attacked the enlightened and wealthy United
Arab States, hijacking commercial planes and
crashing them into the Tigris and Euphrates
World Trade Towers in Baghdad? The date of
that attack, November 9, 2001 – commonly
shorthanded to 11/9 – would go down in infamy,
and lead to an invasion of the Christian
States of America and a long, messy occupation.
The Mirage is set in the year 2009 in this
mirror universe, with the citizens of the UAS
weary of their overseas entanglements, and
the government growing ever more ferocious
in its attempts to crack down on terrorists and
American insurgents.
This is no simple inversion of our own Eastern
and Western civilizations, though – the

UAS isn’t merely the United States with camels
instead of horses. In the UAS, men can have
multiple wives, equal rights for women is a
touchy issue, laws against homosexual activity
are rigorously enforced, the government
is firmly Islamic, and there’s a reason Israel
is located in central Europe. (Such details are
partly gleaned from entries in this world’s
version of Wikipedia, The Library of Alexandria,
which are sprinkled between chapters to
provide background details and shed new light
on what came before). In the UAS, Osama Bin
Laden is a fanatical conservative senator, running
a secret branch of the intelligence services
as a private army – a group called Al Qaeda.
Saddam Hussein is a ‘‘labor leader’’ and big
man in the community, but is widely known
as a mobster and crime boss with delusions
of grandeur. Countless famous historical and
contemporary figures have their roles altered
in radical but logical ways.
But Ruff is mainly interested in the lives of
ordinary people, and how the terrorist attacks
and aftermath have changed them. Our main
protagonist, Mustafa, was a Halal Enforcement
agent, trying to stop alcohol and other forbidden
contraband from entering the UAS, but after
the 11/9 attacks and some personal tragedies
he becomes an agent of Arab Homeland Security.
Under interrogation, a thwarted Christian
suicide bomber tells him an outlandish story:
the world they live in is a lie – a mirage – and
in the real world, America is a superpower,
and the ‘‘United Arab States’’ are a collection
of squabbling Middle Eastern countries, some
bombed into rubble. In the prisoner’s apartment,
Homeland Security finds the front page
of a nonexistent newspaper called The New
York Times dated September 12, 2001, which
supports the bomber’s story. This is our first hint
that Ruff is doing more than just dabbling in the
counterfactual waters of alternate history – he’s
up to something deeper and stranger.
Other artifacts from the alleged ‘‘real’’ world,
where America is a dominant superpower,
begin to appear, and while they’re obviously
fakes, the question is, why would anyone go to
such lengths to create such an elaborate yet ridiculous
hoax? And why are Senator Bin Laden
and his Al Qaeda thugs so murderously determined
to suppress stories about ‘‘the mirage’’?
Mustafa and his fellow agents – including a
closeted-by-necessity gay man and a woman
who has to be twice as tough as the men around
her – travel to occupied America to track down
the source of the mirage rumors.
Ruff’s answers to these mysteries – which
grow more profound and metaphysical as the
book continues – are inventive and satisfying,
and the explanations are all rooted in the culture
and mythology of the Middle East. Mustafa’s
reaction to what he learns leads to some spectacular
set pieces and major upheavals.... but
don’t expect a return to our own reality’s flawed
but cozily familiar status quo.
Ruff’s fondness for Philip K. Dick is wellestablished
– his 2010 novel Bad Monkeys
had a protagonist named Jane Charlotte, after
Dick’s twin sister who died in infancy – and
that author’s influence here is unmistakable,
too. Dick wrote The Man in the High Castle,
after all, a novel set in a world where the Axis
powers won WWII, and where the nature of reality,
and of history itself, are ultimately called
into question. In The Mirage, Matt Ruff has
written a Man in the High Castle for the age
of global terror.
–Tim Pratt
GWENDa BOND
a Monster Calls, Patrick Ness (Walker 978-
1406311525, £12.99, 216pp, hc) May 2011. Cover
by Jim Kay. (Candlewick 978-0763655594,
$16.99, 224pp, hc) September 2011. Cover by
Jim Kay.
What worse monster is there than grief?
Here Chaos Walking trilogy author Patrick
Ness turns his attention to a powerful exploration
of the subject in a story about 13-year-old
Conor O’Malley, who is struggling to come
to terms with what his mother’s failing health
due to cancer means for him. The book stems
from the last, uncompleted project of the late
Siobhan Dowd, an English activist and deservedly
noteworthy author of several wonderful
novels for young readers who died from breast
cancer at the far-too-early age of 47. The publisher
approached Ness – who had never met
Dowd – about taking the idea and finishing the
story and, as he writes in a brief and moving
introduction, after some hesitation he agreed
with the goal ‘‘to write a book I think Siobhan
would have liked.’’
Knowing this, it’s almost impossible for
the adult reader to approach the book without
armor: this is going to hurt. But Ness strips
away those shields with his careful attention
to building Conor’s character from the very
first page. The book begins with the monster
– a walking yew tree – calling on Conor in the
middle of the night, and from this moment to
the last, nothing about this fantasy feels anything
less than real. Conor has just woken from
a recurring nightmare, the truth contained in
it the reason, the monster says, it has arrived.
The monster explains that it has three stories
to tell Conor – who can’t fathom why stories
could possibly be so important, not with his
mother so ill – and then Conor will share his
nightmare truth. As the story progresses and
Conor’s mother is hospitalized, we watch him
battle invisibility at school and alienation from
his father and grandmother, and, most painfully,
lash out with brutal and understandable rage. We
witness his growing hopes that the monster is
going to heal his mother, despite all evidence to
the contrary. The twisted fairy tales the monster
shares themselves bring a sense of foreboding:
they are messy, unexpected. They do not end
with easy, satisfying resolutions.
All of this could easily have become melodrama
and less than involving as a result. After
all, grief is so personal that it creates exactly
the isolation we witness Conor experience. It
leaves everyone else outside its confines, going
about normalcy when within its bubble
the possibility of acting or feeling normal has
long since evaporated. Ness manages to bring
us inside that bubble, bind us to Conor, and yet
also retain a greater awareness than he has of
the terrible pieces we can see arrayed around
him. To Ness’s credit, there are also touches
of humor here and there – in the dry first lines
(‘‘The monster showed up just after midnight.
As they do.’’) and in the conversations between
Conor and the monster. Those also help ground
the story in Conor’s pain, so specific and yet so
universal, that we can’t help but feel every bit
of it. a Monster Calls is illustrated by Jim Kay
in stark yet beautifully textured black-and-white
images, and the publisher has done a marvelous
job with the book design.
As I said at the start of this review, it is difficult
– impossible, probably – for the adult
reader to completely lose the additional weight
of the circumstances surrounding this book, and
even in its very gorgeousness as an artifact, it
honors and memorializes Dowd. But that said,
most younger readers will probably not be as
burdened by that same awareness. What will
make this a classic children’s book about anger,
grief, and loss is not the circumstances of its
creation but Ness’s bone-deep understanding
that in order for this book to be a tribute, it had
to first be a satisfying, compelling, and – above
all – honest story. And that is exactly what A
Monster Calls is.
abarat: absolute Midnight, Clive Barker
(HarperCollins 978-0060291716, $24.99,
592pp, hc) September 2011.
Welcome back to the Abarat, Clive Barker’s
sprawling fantasy archipelago that exists in the
shadow of our own reality, and where fanciful
citizens inhabit each of 24 islands representing
an hour of the day or night (but with far more
interesting names, like Ninnyhammer, the
Nonce, Yebba Dim Day, or Efreet) – plus one
more island representing the final, mysterious
25th hour – and where the forces of night and
day are constantly battling for control. The first
volume of Barker’s Books of Abarat series,
Abarat, was published in 2002, followed by the
second installment, Days of Magic, Nights of
War, in 2004. Last fall the third in the series
(now projected to be five books rather than the
initially planned four), absolute Midnight,
was finally published. Lavishly illustrated by
Barker’s own artwork – 150 pieces reproduced
in this book alone – the tale only continues to
increase in scope.
The previous installments introduced us to the
series’ heroine, 16-year-old Candy Quackenbush
from Chickentown MN, a misfit with one brown
eye and one blue whose father is an abusive alcoholic
and whose mother is unhappily trapped
in marriage to him. After crossing from the
mundane chicken-factory-farming town into
the outlandishly fantastical Abarat – where her
best friends include Malingo, a geshrat, and
John Mischief, whose seven brothers are outgrowths
of his antlers – it becomes increasingly
clear that Candy has not come by chance alone.
Her destiny is entwined with Abarat’s, even if
exactly how is not clear. Candy is a forthright,
spunky, loyal girl, and these qualities earn her
� p. 69
LOCUS February 2012 / 29

Nova, Samuel R. Delany (Doubleday, 280pp, hc)
1968. Cover by Russell Fitzgerald.
aye, and Gomorrah, Samuel R. Delany (Vintage
0-375-70671-2, $14.00, 384pp, pb) 2003.
Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany (Bantam, 880pp,
pb) 1975.
If fiction aspires to be – in John Gardner’s
phrase – a vivid and continuous dream, then
surely SF of all genres should prize vividness
in the worlds it gives readers. But too often,
SFnal futures are described with all the colour
of furniture assembly manuals. Some writers
are exceptions, like Roger Zelazny, whom I
discussed last time. I can think of no clearer
example of vividness in SF than the early work
of Zelazny’s near-contemporary Samuel R. Delany.
His sequence of novels from The Jewels
of aptor (1962) to Nova (1968) had a wealth
of colour, specificity, and strangeness that was
entirely new to the field. Although many of the
books were paperback originals that vanished
quickly, they’ve since been handsomely reissued,
especially thanks to the US publisher Vintage.
As a sample of what Delany can do, here’s the
passage that first hooked me many years ago, a
few pages into Nova:
The Mouse stared at the pearls behind
rough, blinking lids.
‘‘You, boy. Do you know what it was like?’’
Must be blind, the Mouse thought. Moves
like blind. Head sits forward so on his neck.
And his eyes –
The codger flapped out his hand, caught
a chair, and yanked it to him. It rasped as he
fell on the seat. ‘‘Do you know what it looked
like, felt like, smelt like – do you?’’
The Mouse shook his head; the fingers
tapped his cheek.
‘‘We were moving out, boy, with the three
hundred suns of the Pleiades glittering like
a puddle of jeweled milk on our left, and all
blackness wrapped around our right. The
ship was me; I was the ship. With these
sockets – ’’ he tapped the insets in his wrists
against the table: click ‘‘ – I was plugged
into my vane-projector. Then – ’’ the stubble
on his jaw rose and fell with the words
‘‘ – centered on the dark, a light! It reached
out, grabbed our eyes as we lay in the
projection chambers and wouldn’t let them
Yesterday’s Tomorrows
by Graham Sleight
go. It was like the universe was torn and all
day raging through. I wouldn’t go off sensory
input. I wouldn’t look away. All the colors
you could think of were there, blotting the
night. And finally the shock waves: the walls
sang! Magnetic inductance oscillated over
our ship, nearly rattled us apart. But then it
was too late. I was blind.’’ He sat back in his
chair. ‘‘I’m blind, boy. But with a funny kind
of blindness: I can see you. I’m deaf. But if
you talked to me, I could understand most
of what you said. Olfactory nerves mostly
shorted out at the brain end. Same with the
taste buds over my tongue.’’
‘‘Jeweled milk,’’ for me, is the magic phrase
there. It taps into one’s dreams of voyaging
among the stars at a very primitive level. It’s
a dream of freedom and potential, grounded
by the devastated state of the story’s teller. But
there’s more in that passage. One of Delany’s
particular strengths is his sensitivity to the telling
sensory detail: the rasp of a chair on the floor,
the click of an embedded socket on a table, the
feel of fingers on one’s cheek. But here, the man
who’s speaking is cut off from all that, as he
says. Or rather, he’s suffered too much sensory
input because of his voyaging – and not just his
sight. Notice too how casually those embedded
sockets are introduced, and with them a whole
implied world of integration between humans
and their machines.
The plot of Nova is self-consciously mythic, a
recreation of the Prometheus story. Super-heavy
elements such as ‘‘Illyrion’’ are immensely valuable,
but can best be harvested from the heart of
an exploding star. Nova follows Captain Lorq
von Ray, who is obsessed with achieving this.
He’s accompanied by Katin, a scholar, and the
Mouse, a wandering musician. The story concerns
itself with the old question: can one steal
fire from the heavens? If so, what would the
consequences be? Two things surprised me on rereading
the book. Firstly, despite the drive of the
quest plot, how much of it is told through flashback
or relatively static conversation. Delany
takes a number of sidebars from the main line of
the story to illustrate the society he’s describing.
Characters are positioned with minute attention
to how they sit in society, or to their economic
and family context. Secondly, how much this is
a dialogue-driven story. I had remembered the
Samuel R. Delany (1960s)
book as being very much weighted towards description.
But those descriptions are overwhelmingly
given by the characters – that is, filtered
through their subjective experience of the world.
(And the book as a whole, which initially looks
as if it’s told in the third person, turns out to be
by one of the characters.) With such gestures,
Delany is making moves that immerse us in the
world, that don’t allow us omniscient distance
from it. Nor are we even allowed much ironic
distance from it, even though the book’s real
author is no stranger to irony. For all that Delany
is conscious that a story is just make believe or
(his appropriated term) subjunctive, Nova is also
a book that very deliberately compels belief.
Many of the same features are present in
Delany’s short fiction, collected in aye and
Gomorrah and Other Stories. Understandably,
though, they’re more experimental and cover a
wider range of territory. It’s also possible to see
certain motifs from Nova and the earlier books
settle into patterns that Delany used repeatedly.
The protagonist is often an artist or bohemian
of some kind. The science fictional novum is
often described from the ground up – or rather,
the default assumption is that it won’t just be
perceived by its owners or winners. I’ve seen a
lot of people describe stories like ‘‘Time Considered
as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones’’ as
‘‘garish,’’ which is true but only part of the truth.
Certainly, it’s about crime in a future New York,
and about the social structures that exist around
it. But it’s also very visibly experimental in style,
delighting in wordplay. The style is inseparable
from the world that’s being described because
the style is the means through which we experience
the world.
Delany’s fondness for the first-person in these
stories enables him to do a number of things.
Firstly, it gives him a way unselfconsciously to
represent the intensity of feeling underpinning
some of the stories. In particular, it lets him
embody this in the style: these are stories full
of self-interruptions, tangents, memories. (In the
afterword to this book, Delany acknowledges the
influence of Theodore Sturgeon, about whom
many of the same things could be said.) Secondly,
it reiterates the sense that a story is told
� p. 69
LOCUS February 2012 / 31

locus looks aT arT books: karen haber & Francesca myman �
KaREN HaBER
a Tolkien Tapestry: Pictures to accompany
The Lord of the Rings, Cor Blok (HarperCollins
UK 978-0007437986, £20.00, 160pp, hc)
September 2011. Cover by Cor Blok.
Hardware: The Definitive SF Works
of Chris Foss, Chris Foss (Titan 978-1-
84856698-9, $34.95, 240pp, hc) September
2011. Cover by Chris Foss.
Out of This World: Science Fiction But Not
as You Know It, Mike Ashley, ed. (British
Library 978-0712358316, £27.95, 144pp, hc)
May 2011. Cover by Henrique Alvim Corrêa.
SHORT TaKES
Fantasy+ 3: Best Hand-Painted Illustrations,
Vincent Zhao, ed. (CYPI/Gingko 978-
0-95628804-2, $29.95, 192pp, pb) February
2011. Cover by Volkan Baga.
Exposé 9, Daniel Wade, ed. (Ballistic Press
978-1921828027, $79.00, pp, hc) August 2011.
Cover by Xiaoao Yuelingshan.
a Tolkien Tapestry is a fascinating footnote
to the library of Tolkien-related art and
art history. Over 100 illustrations inspired by
Lord of the Rings, painted 50 years ago by
Dutch artist Cor Blok, have been gathered into
a book thanks to the diligence and sleuthing
of editor Pieter Collier. Until recently, Blok’s
Tolkien illustrations were obscure works
known to Dutch fantasy readers as covers of
the Lord of the Rings books in the Netherlands
in the 1960s. The paintings themselves,
a project by Blok when he was an art student,
were mostly owned by the artist, but several
had been scattered and were considered to be
lost.
Thanks to Collier’s efforts, they’ve been
rescued and are assembled in this book in
narrative order, accompanied by appropriate
excerpts from Tolkien’s text. Although constrained
by the size limitations and condition
of the works – many of them are fragile miniatures,
painted in gouache on layers of wrinkled
silk paper to heighten their archaic appearance
(see p. 73, p. 80) – the reproductions in
this book provide an excellent opportunity for
readers to acquaint themselves with this singular
vision of familiar characters and events.
It’s refreshing to see images bearing no
reference to the LotR films nor to any conventions
of current fantasy illustration. These
are unique, charming works out of the past,
from a time before the Internet and art software
reigned over the fantasy illustration field,
and before Lord of the Rings was an anagram,
much less a legend towing considerable visual
freight.
Blok was already deeply enmeshed in medieval
art, specifically tapestry, when he began
to read Tolkien’s tales of Middle-earth, and
had invented an alternate history for a fictitious
land, Barbarusia, whose medieval art
he devoted much time and energy to creating.
Impressed by Tolkien’s powerful storytelling,
32 / LOCUS February 2012
Blok wanted to paint illustrations of the text
and carried his alternate medieval aesthetic
over to the project.
Taking the Bayeaux Tapestry as his guide,
Blok created over 100 highly stylized gouache
paintings. His idiosyncratic work does often
evoke medieval art. However, on occasion it
tips over into cartoonishness, reminding this
viewer of the fiendish Boris Badenov from the
animated TV show Rocky and His Friends
and the black-and-white antagonists of Antonio
Prohias’ Spy vs. Spy series in Mad Magazine.
Perhaps the paintings can be more easily appreciated
once viewers understand that Blok
employed a visual shorthand informed by the
expressive conventions of 10th-century tapestry-makers:
flat images without dimensional illusion,
lack of background, limited detail, and
color range. Blok omitted anything that was
not strictly required by the narrative.
Blok sent samples of his work to J.R.R. Tolkien,
who responded with enthusiasm and an offer
to buy two of the paintings. (Rumor has it
that Tolkien’s daughter purchased additional
works.) A letter from Tolkien to Blok is reproduced
as a pendant illustration to the book’s
foreword.
The book is well designed and nicely bound.
The images are for the most part well reproduced
except for a few small images that may
have been reproduced from old slides or pho-
tos. They’re presented in story order, accompanied
by extracts from the Lord of the Rings,
and commentary by the artist. Blok has also
provided an extensive introduction that sheds
light on his creative process and the history of
these illustrations.
Now a retired professor of art history with
several academic publications to his credit,
Blok views these youthful works done so many
years ago with understandable ambivalence, as
can be seen from his 32-page introduction, and
remarks he’s made in interviews promoting
the book and the Tolkien Calendar (in which
they have been featured since 2010). He even
admits to having destroyed about a dozen of
the works because he felt they were failures.
Blok continued to paint sporadically, coming
under the influence of modern artists including
R.B. Kitaj, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst,
Kandinsk, Paul Klee, and David Hockney. Between
1964 and the early 1970s he produced a
number of oil paintings and drawings and had
three exhibitions, the last one in 1968. Since
1973 he has been working on an epic length
graphic novel that may eventually see publication.
With the publication of a Tolkien Tapestry,
he will always be linked to the Lord of the
Rings, like it or not.
a Tolkien Tapestry is a fascinating addition
to the wealth of imagery associated with J.R.R.
Tolkien’s hobbit tales. It also provides a brief
glimpse into how a writer can inspire an artist.

Anyone with an interest in Tolkien – or narrative
painting – should check this out.
Hardware: The Definitive SF Works of
Chris Foss is the first in-depth retrospective
of this hugely influential artist’s work. Foss,
whose distinctive inelegant treatment of space
hardware and alien landscapes was featured on
the covers of books by Philip K. Dick, Arthur
C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and J.G. Ballard, deserves
the attention he gets here. He was one of
the first artists to suggest that the future might
not be shiny.
Foss’s spaceships aren’t glossy idealized silver
phalluses piercing the darkness. They’re
stubby, beat-up workhorses that look more like
tugboats, freighters, and ferries. They’ve been
put to hard use and show it on their scarred,
pitted, dirty hulls.
The lack of glamor – a novelty in pre-Bladerunner
science fiction – is a hallmark of Foss’s
work. His gritty realism helped to change the
way the future was depicted in art and film. The
future he painted is full of the signs of humanity
in the wear-and-tear on what are, after all,
machines, even if they’re in space. In Foss’ high
contrast, boldly colored paintings spaceships
are shown doing what spaceships usually do:
orbit planets, do battle, explode. It’s a lot of fun
if you like that kind of thing.
With very little text and 500-plus images,
Hardware feels stuffed with art. Nothing distracts
us from the images – well reproduced,
and many displayed in full page bleeds, several
as two-page bleeds. Occasionally, a smaller
image fails to feature a painting to its best advantage.
There are, however, some small gems
to be found here: a science fiction landscape
is shown transformed by the artist – literally
repainted – into a western landscape. Several
pages beyond that, a charming purple-and-yellow
patterned dinosaur wanders toward the gutter.
Among the larger images, one of my favorites
is the cover painting, ‘‘Turner Spaceship’’,
also featured as a two-page bleed. It looks like
a police cruiser about to pounce on some interstellar
smuggler.
Some of these paintings will be familiar to
science fiction art fans and have been published
in previous Foss collections (21st Century
Foss, Diary of a Spaceperson). But other
works appear for the first time. Sure to be of
interest to film aficionados are sketches from
movie concept work that Foss made for a failed
attempt to film Dune in the 1970s.
Organization of the paintings is sketchy and
the images appear in no particular order. Information
about each work is limited to its title,
the book it appeared on, the publisher, and the
date. We’re left to guess about the media, size,
support materials, etc. Also missing: an image
index.
The binding, color reproduction, and paper
quality are superb. Foss’s daughter Imogene
provides an interesting bio profile, and there are
appreciations by Moebius and Alejandro Jodorowsky,
both of whom worked with Foss on the
failed Dune project. Rian Hughs has written an
interesting introduction. This very handsome
hardcover book is a tremendous value. As its
title promises, it offers the best, most comprehensive
collection of Chris Foss’s work to date.
Commercial artists and science fiction fans will
love it.
The British Library recently mounted a major
exhibit on science fiction – with special
emphasis on British authors – claiming to chart
the history of science fiction over 2,000 years.
The accompanying book/exhibit catalog by SF
authority Mike Ashley, Out of This World:
Science Fiction But Not as You Know It, can
stand alone as a well-illustrated scholarly work
on the history of science fiction.
Divided into six sections – Alien Worlds,
Parallel Worlds, Future Worlds, Virtual Worlds,
Perfect Worlds, and The End of the World – the
book considers the impact of technology and
scientific advances on society and science fiction.
Ashley’s six-century survey ranges from
the work of Cyrano de Bergerac, Mary Shelley,
Aldous Huxley, and H.G. Wells, to Robert A.
Heinlein, Phillip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Ursula
K. Le Guin, and J.G. Ballard. Thumbnail
portraits of many authors are included. Of particular
interest is a full manuscript page – with
hand-written corrections – from an early draft
of The Burning World by J.G. Ballard.
Of less interest are the question-bearing sidebars
that occasionally intrude to remind the
reader that this book is intended as a companion
to an educational exhibition: ‘‘Just imagine.
What form will humans take in a million or a
billion years’ time, or will humans exist at all?
Might an animal evolve and prove superior? If
so, which one?’’ These are obviously intended
for school children and/or their dimwitted parents,
and are easily ignored, but frankly, they
could have been omitted altogether with no
damage to the book.
The strength of the book lies in its illustrations,
a bounty of material from the British
Library vaults including early engravings, pulp
magazine covers, stills from movies, and even
the first digitally painted book cover for Neuromancer
by Rick Berry (listed here as Richard).
Perhaps the most thought-provoking material is
the collection of charming antiquarian science
fiction and fantasy images. The earliest, dated
1482, depicts some of the fantastic creatures
described in Travels of Sir John Mandeville.
Next we have a 1638 image of Francis Godwin’s
adventurous character Domingo Gonsales
and his trained flock of birds transporting
him in The Man in the Moone, and in 1687
comes the first illustration of the ramjet principle
as imagined by Cyrano de Bergerac in The
Comical History of the States and Empires
of the Worlds of the Moon and Sun. Other
notable early fantasy illustrations include a
frontispiece from Le Philosophe sans pretention,
ou l’homme rare [The Philosopher
Without Pretension or The Rare Man] by Louis
Guillaume (1775) depicting a traveler from
the planet Mercury arriving on Earth in his
electric flying vehicle, Laputa as imagined by
J.J. Grandville in 1838 from Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels, and a wood engraving by
Camille Flammarion (1888) showing a medieval
missionary discovering the exact place
where Earth and sky meet.
This is a handsome softcover volume, well
designed and stylish, printed on good paper,
with a useful chronology, index, and suggested
reading list included. The illustrative materials
make this a highly desirable book for any students
of science fiction and fantasy art.
SHORT TaKES
Fantasy+ 3: Best Hand-Painted Illustrations
is the third in a series edited by Vincent
Zhao (Fantasy+ 2: Best artworks of CG artists,
Fantasy CG+: Best artworks of Chinese
CG artists), and the first art book we’ve seen
from China aimed at a Western audience.
Editor Zhao has chosen well: this volume
features a splendid international cast of artists
including Shaun Tan, Donato Giancola, Terese
Nielsen, Petar Meseldzija, Brian Despain,
Daren Bader, Ciruelo Cabral, Tom Fowler, Eric
Joyner, Don Maitz, Volkan Baga, Lucas Graciano,
Peter Ferguson, Raul Cruz, Ron Spears,
Eric Fortune, Steven Belledin, Ralph Horseley,
Greg Staples, and Adrian Smith.
Each artist is featured with a brief introduction
and Q&A. The chapter titles and introductions
can seem a bit cryptic at times – misadventures
of translation? – but Zhao’s enthusiasm
for the work is never in question. He is,
however, misinformed re: his claim that Shaun
Tan designed the title character in Pixar’s animated
film WALL-E. (Tan provided concept art
for that film. )
This tasty assortment of international talent
features beautifully reproduced work in luscious
color on creamy paper, with many goodsized
images, often full page. Unfortunately,
the paintings are identified by name only, without
information on medium, size, dates, etc.
There is also no index to the book.
The editor’s interest in these artists and familiarity
with the fantasy and SF art field gives
this collection a personal flavor often lacking in
‘‘best of’’ volumes. This attractive book bodes
well for future volumes from Vincent Zhao.
Exposé 9 is yet another in the annual series
from Ballistic, crammed full of exciting and
beautiful digital art from around the world. This
year the number of artists included has been
pushed to an astounding 444, with 51 more images
shown than in the previous year’s volume.
To achieve this the editors have pared down text
and stolen space wherever possible. The result
is a triumph of design ingenuity in which the
editors and designers have maintained the quality
and look of the book. The many images in
so many varied categories are featured here at
good size, with fine color reproduction.
The book opens with the spotlight on Grand
Master Daniel Docu, followed by a mind-boggling
number of images and categories. The
book’s internal categories change from year to
year, in an attempt by the editors to have groupings
that best represent the balance of the entries.
Among this year’s standouts are Portraits,
� p. 70
LOCUS February 2012 / 33

2011: The year in revieW
2011 Recommended Reading
Liza Groen Trombi with Francesca Myman,
Heather Shaw, and Chloe Smith ..............34
Gary K. Wolfe ..............................................38
Faren C. Miller .............................................39
Jonathan Strahan ........................................40
2011 recommenDeD reaDing
2011: THE YEaR IN REVIEW
by Liza Groen Trombi
The discussion about The Year in Books once
again reinforced that there are way too many titles
for even our set of readers and reviewers to get to
all of them. As evidence of the changing tides, the
number of adult paranormal romance titles seen
was down for the first time in years, though there
were more young-adult books than ever, both listed
and recommended, and a good number of first
novels to boot. Post-apocalyptic adventures and
dystopias abound! A large number of fine titles that
we reviewed didn’t end up on the list, and this year
more than in the past, I wished there were space to
Liza Groen Trombi (2011)
list all the runners-up.
As always, some titles defy categorization – fantasies
masquerading as science fiction and vice versa, alternate histories with
ghosts thrown in, bug-tech with magical origins, etc. It pains me a little that
Neal Stephenson’s Reamde didn’t make it on the list; despite having so many
reviewers who loved it, no one was willing to say that it was skiffy enough.
Others would have been trickier to shoehorn into a single category comfortably,
if not for their positions on the first-novel or young-adult lists.
We’re recommending 152 books this year, up from 141 last year. There were
five shorter books counted as well – standalone novellas – down
from six last year.
We listed 2,144 new books, up a smidge from 2,100 in 2010.
Each year we miss titles, maybe even several hundred; there
are too many limited edition, obscure, or associational books
to see everything. We don’t have a good way of tracking all the
e-books being published and are working on getting a system in
place for those, but it’s a bit like trying to count fish in a river:
slippery at best. We do try to include any books with genre elements,
if those elements are crucial to the story, though we’ve
of course not read or even received everything eligible, since the
collective ‘‘we’’ can only look at titles sent to us, and only read
a portion of those. Please don’t just tell us what we’ve missed
that you’ve seen – get us a copy (or lend it) so we can list it,
describe it, and maybe recommend it. Despite the limitations
inherent in attempting to see all the books (well, almost), read enough (certainly
impossible), and have an intelligent discussion about them (...), we’re
pretty happy with the list.
The next section is the annual boilerplate, to read or not read depending.
We’ve dropped various subsidy publishers from the final publishers
lists – Xlibris, iUniverse, etc. – although it’s hard to tell a vanity publisher
from a self-published book. We will continue to list their books in our
monthly descriptive lists; we’re only dropping them from our publisher
end-of-the-year numbers since they’re really printers, not publishers.
Our Recommended Reading List – see pages 42-44 – is a consensus
by the reviewing staff, outside reviewers, other professionals, other
lists, etc. We are willing to bet only a few good ones got away, including
obscure British books uncovered by our British compatriots late in the
year, but not read by enough people. We’ll extend some of the eligibilities
to next year with the US editions. To make the final list, it took at
least two positive mentions without a dissent, or three with a dissent
or. . . you get the picture.
Since some of the recommenders are also authors and editors connected
with Locus, there may appear to be some conflict of interest. No
one is allowed to vote for books they wrote or edited, but if there are
enough outside votes, we put them on the list.
The short fiction list this year is based on material provided by Jonathan
Strahan, Ellen Datlow, Stefan Dziemianowicz, Gardner Dozois,
David G. Hartwell, Rich Horton, Adrienne Martini, Tansy Rayner Roberts,
Lois Tilton, Gary K. Wolfe, and others. Stories with three positive mentions,
and some with two, made the final list; some had six mentions.
34 / LOCUS February 2012
Russell Letson ............................................45
Graham Sleight ...........................................46
Paul Witcover ..............................................47
Adrienne Martini ..........................................48
Carolyn Cushman .......................................49
Gardner Dozois ...........................................49
Rich Horton .................................................50
2011 Recommended Reading List .............42
2011 Book Summary ...................................52
2011 Magazine Summary ............................56
‘‘Publication’’ itself is not an exact term. We follow the Tom Clancy
court case, which says a book is published when it is offered for sale.
American trade books used to appear months before their official publication
date, but now books mostly appear in their month of publication,
although several publishers still appear early. British books have always
appeared during their official publication month, and small-press books
usually after – sometimes way after, if ever. We are holding some books
dated January 2012 until next year for recommendation, even though
we saw and listed them in November or December 2011. There are also
sometimes books dated 2010 not seen until 2011. British, as well as Canadian
or Australian works, are eligible when published. We also include
any books first appearing in the English language from other countries.
For short fiction, we use cover date for magazines, but publication
date for books.
As usual, there are arguments about where to put novels. Is it SF
or fantasy or horror? Is it all three? We’ve picked as best we can and
squeezed various rectangular pegs into ellipsoid holes.
SF NOVELS
This year we listed 305 SF novels, including YA, well up from 285 last year.
We’re recommending 23 titles, up from last year’s 17. On the US side, the
titles came from a wide spread of imprints, though Tor published the highest
percentage with six titles. Four came out from Ace; two from Del Rey, Orbit,
and Night Shade; one from Spectra, Doubleday, Prime, and Scribner. On the UK
side, three came out from Orbit UK, two came out from PS Publishing,
and one from Gollancz, and one from Macmillan; there was one from
Harper Voyager Australia. At least seven were off-planet, with four onship,
and an oft-recurring theme of post-apocalypse and reconstruction.
Of the 23 titles, 11 were parts of series, with several concluding
volumes of trilogies, and two announced as starts of series. Leviathan
Wakes launches the space opera Expanse series by James S.A. Corey,
a collaborative pseudonym comprising Daniel Abraham & Ty Franck.
Look there for ‘‘space battles and encounters with low-life corridor
scum and exposing the manipulations of corporate psychopaths and…
heroic last stands and blowing stuff up’’ [Russell Letson]. Egan’s The
Clockwork Rocket begins a new hard-SF trilogy through the eyes of
protagonist Yalda, who begins studying the physics (diagrams included!)
of her unusual world, while at the same time discovering her own desire
for personal and intellectual independence, despite the impending betrayal
of her own physiology. Daybreak Zero, sequel to last year’s Directive
51, continues John Barnes’s uncomfortable vision of
forced post-petroleum survival and reconstruction, and
a critical look at self-organizing movements. Elizabeth
Bear’s Grail concludes her generation-ship series
as the Jacob’s Ladder finally reaches its destination
to find the planet already inhabited. This Shared
Dream by Kathleen Ann Goonan follows her 2007
title In War Times, featuring the Dance children and
grandchildren after the activation of the Hadntz Device
and their adventures in the different timelines it creates.
Vernor Vinge’s Children of the Sky is the third
volume in the Zones of Thought cycle, an exotic and
elaborate planetary romance adventure with hive psychology,
politics, intrigue, betrayal, and misdirection.
Vortex by Robert Charles Wilson is the final book in
the trilogy started with Hugo Award winning title Spin; it does not disappoint.
In standalones, or at least with no announcement of a series, 7th Sigma by
Steven Gould, whose earlier Jumper was adapted into the eponymous movie,
presents a carefully imagined and sufficiently nerdy SFnal Western, set in a
Southwest razed by robotic bugs that burrow through anything, including flesh,
to feed on metals. A nod to The Jungle Book, protagonist Kimble learns to
make his way without parents, becoming the first student and apprentice to a
sensei opening a dojo and homesteading in the wasteland that is all that is left
of Arizona and New Mexico. In Embassytown, Miéville once again stretches
the bounds, and sometimes the patience, of his readers in an indulgent explora-

tion of alien linguistics, specifically of the Arieke, who
display a singular path of development bound by their
use of Language, and their interactions and problematic
communication with the humans posted on their planet.
Other books either didn’t stand out for me or I ran
out of time to get to them. The reviewers will cover
more titles in their summaries.
FaNTaSY NOVELS
We listed 660 fantasy novels, including young adult,
up once again from 614, and 229 horror novels, down
from 251 last year. We don’t count paranormal romance
in fantasy, but urban fantasy (vampires and werewolves
included), is counted unless so dark as to be horror;
there were 416 listed as paranormal romance, up from 384.
We’re recommending 25 books, up from 24 last year. Series books were
again a significant portion of the list: 13 out of the 25, with the Abraham and
the Courtenay Grimwood announced as firsts. Gail Carriger continues her
ever-entertaining Parasol Protectorate series with the penultimate Heartless;
Daniel Fox, AKA Chaz Brenchley, completes his Moshui trilogy with Hidden
Cities; Lev Grossman middles his Magicians series,
this time with Quentin as he breaks out on his own
looking for adventure; George R.R. Martin delivers the
long-awaited fifth installment in his epic Song of Ice
and Fire cycle; and Terry Pratchett’s 39th Discworld
book Snuff centers around the at once humorous and
perilous adventures of Samuel Vimes, head of the
Watch. Joe Abercrombie’s popular and controversial
The Heroes, covers the events of a
bloody three-day battle between the
wild North and civilized South, not
a direct sequel but set in the world of
the First Law Trilogy. Enigmatic Pilot
by Kris Saknussemm is also linked by
setting to earlier volume Zanesville,
and is an outrageous, steampunkish tall-tale following the
brilliant five-year-old Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd and his family
in their trek across 1844 America. Of the standalones, in
Briarpatch Tim Pratt tells the dark and sometimes manic
tale of Bay Area protagonist Darrin as he descends into the
whimsy of the Briarpatch, ‘‘a disorderly snarl of worlds,’’ in
search of his dead girlfriend; Jo Walton tells the compelling
and achingly familiar story about a young Welsh girl finding
solace and wonder in reading science fiction books in the highly acclaimed
among Others; and Daryl Gregory continues to shine, balancing fine literary
storytelling with genre appeal while not shying away from the pop culture roots
of zombie lore, in Raising Stony Mayhall.
FIRST NOVELS
We listed 128 first novels this year, up from 119 last year. We have 13 on
our recommended list, spanning the breadth of genre sensibilities. Six were SF,
seven were fantasy, and no horror; eight were by women, 5 by men.
All of the first novels were extraordinary this year, with a large percentage
set in post-apocalyptic worlds. A favorite was Mechanique
by Genevieve Valentine, the dark but compelling
story of the gilded Circus Tresaulti, whose ringmaster
holds the power to give the gift of metamorphosis to
her performers, as they travel through a bleak, postwar
land; sparely told but never lacking in depth and
textual nuance. Another powerful and provocative
post-apocalyptic tale comes from Hugo Award winning
author Will McIntosh in his first novel Soft apocalypse.
Society has slowly disintegrated in the face
of lack of resources, terrorism, climate change, etc.,
and college-educated but now
homeless Jasper must learn to
survive, and perhaps to find
happiness, in an unfamiliar
world. A stunning and action-packed read, Seed by
Rob Ziegler looks at a 22nd-century America whose
ravaged population is starving under the stranglehold
of ‘‘single-use seed’’ manufacturer Satori. In another
vein entirely, young-adult title The Girl of Fire and
Thorns by Rae Carson is about Elsa, an overweight
princess who somehow always fails to live up to the
expectations of her family and subjects, and is married
off at the age of 16 to a beautiful but weak prince.
When the kingdom comes into jeopardy, she learns
to find her own strengths as she tries to save the world – a fantastic story for
teens about transformation.
YOUNG aDULT
We listed 477 young-adult novels in 2011, a spectacular increase from 2010’s
384. We may now be seeing the impact of the siren song of YA’s commercial
success, especially from the past couple of years when publishing budgets were
shrinking. We knew there was more migration of established adult authors, as
well as new authors looking for a lucrative niche, and then there are the titles
which would previously have been published as adult
coming out as YA. This year’s list reflects all of those
trends with 25 titles, up from 14 last year. Six are science
fiction, the rest are fantasy. Eleven were parts of
series or in the same universe as a series.
Of the series books, Clive Barker finished up with
abarat: absolute Midnight, a satisfying ending that
came out to an underwhelming amount of fanfare.
Holly Black continues her Curse Workers series with
Red Glove, as Cassel Sharpe tries to find a way to be
normal despite his family’s link to the mob, magic,
and curses. Ian McDonald moves into YA with the
stunning Planesrunner, first in the Everness series.
Everett Singh’s scientist father is kidnapped right in
front of him while bicycling the streets of London, but he has left his son an
app that is a map of all of possible timelines – the Infundibulum. Everett must
rescue his Dad and protect the Infindulum from the forces of the Ten Known
Worlds. Scott Westerfeld concludes his Leviathan trilogy with Goliath, a
cracking adventure set in his alternate version of WWI, picking up where
Behemoth left off.
Standalones include The Boy at the End of the World; Greg van
Eekhout takes Fisher, possibly the last boy on Earth, and his companions
– the irritatingly protective and slightly malfunctioning robot Click and
a baby mammoth named Protein – on a search for other humans, and
answers. Patrick Ness weaves a beautiful and
terrible tale about the monster that is grief in
the illustrated a Monster Calls, based on the
last idea from author Siobhan Dowd who died
of cancer before she could write it. Daughter
of Smoke and Bone by NBA-nominated Laini
Taylor is the first in a trilogy, an intricate and
absorbing book about Karou, a blue-haired
teenager raised by monsters. One title that came
under scrutiny from our group was Beth Revis’s
across the Universe, a marvelous book about a teen
on a colony ship who is woken 50 years too early, but
with a notable scientific error in the last chapter (stated
by a lying character). It is supposed to set up the next
book, but a questionable choice in a genre that likes its science.
I could go on; the list is full of wonderful young-adult books, but I am running
out of space so will leave the rest to the reviewers.
–Liza Groen Trombi
COLLECTIONS
We’re recommending 20 collections, down from 26
last year. Most were published by small or independent
presses. We received 111, down from 138 last year.
We have five career retrospectives to recommend
this year. The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller:
Volume 1 compiles 88 stories from 1954-2002, with
at least one additional volume planned. Emshwiller’s
stories stand the test of time: uncompromising, experimental,
and literary, with plenty to say about marriage,
family, and gender roles that still needs to be heard.
Joan Aiken’s The Monkey’s
Wedding and Other Stories
is another important collection
with stories dating from the ’50s to 2002. Aiken’s
mid-20th-century Britain is at once familiar and
strange: a hapless Cobbleigh’s Cream Stout advertiser
is haunted by ghostly squid, a mermaid is trapped in
a jar, the water of youth is sold to an actress for 270
pounds, nine shillings, and ninepence. Matilda Told
Such Dreadful Lies: The Essential Lucy Sussex, a
career-spanning compilation of tales from the Australian
author, is a standout, with stories ranging from
fantasy to SF, from Cajun country to Madagascar, all
informed by the author’s status as a scholar of femi-
�
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� Recommended Reading
nist SF. Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1963-1973, the first volume of a
planned series, demonstrates the usual archival quality we’ve
come to expect from the Library of America volumes, and
includes four novels, three short stories, letters, essays, and
other ephemera, as well as a detailed timeline of Vonnegut’s
life. The Collected Short Works of Poul anderson Volume
4: admiralty continues the fine series from NESFA, with
examples of Anderson’s best work from 1950-1984.
We have two first collections to recommend this year.
Daryl Gregory’s Unpossible and Other Stories is excellent;
Gregory foregrounds nuanced character study against
a backdrop of worlds that invite questions about the nature
of consciousness, neurology, physiology, and pop mythology.
Love and Romanpunk by Tansy Rayner Roberts is a
knockout series of interlinked stories with kick-ass slayers,
vampires, wit, and conviction: you can expect a wild ride
from Ancient Rome to Victorian-era Europe, to modern Australia, to an
airship-tech future.
We have 13 follow-up collections on the list this year. The Inheritance:
an anthology of Tales from the Six Duchies and Beyond combines stories
from one writer with two voices, or perhaps two writers with one body on
timeshare: Robin Hobb/Megan Lindholm. With Hobb
on the epic fantasy side and Lindholm exploring fantasy,
horror, and SF, there’s something for everyone
here. The Universe of Things by Gwyneth Jones is
the most comprehensive collection of Jones’s short
fiction to be published in the US to date. The author
defies expectations, transgresses genres, and makes
us laugh and cry. Peter S. Beagle’s Sleight of Hand
includes previously uncollected works, with several
published here for the first time. Settings range from
the Bronx, to the bayou, to small town Moss Harbor,
and characters and relationships are handled with
the warmth and care we’ve come to expect from this
modern master.
We loved Maureen McHugh’s after the apocalypse:
near future, post-apocalyptic SF stories, from zombies to biotech
corporations to AI, all seen from the perspective of ordinary folk just trying
to get by. TVa Baby by Terry Bisson puts modern culture under a scientist’s
warped lens, with results that are surreal, engaging, and tough-as-nails. When
the Great Days Come by Gardner Dozois is equally tough-as-nails, with hard
SF, fantasy, horror, and alternate history stories from 1970 to 2010, from an
author who knows how to turn, spin, and rock a phrase.
Paradise Tales by Geoff Ryman collects 16 stories that tackle concerns of
sexuality, aging, guilt, and alienation with gentle attention to the underlying
humanity of his subjects, even those that are literally
inhuman. Wind angels is a breath of fresh air from
Leigh Kennedy, an author with a strong and compelling
voice, whether it’s the voice of an American tow-truck
driver with ESP, a Texan receiving odd mementos from
an old flame, or a British policewoman trying to entrap
a killer. Yellowcake, an offering from Australian
author Margo Lanagan, should not be missed, with
its visceral, compelling tales. Lanagan never pulls
her punches, but always manages to retain a certain
delicacy of touch that stems from her loving, intricate
language. Caitlín R. Kiernan presents a series
of resonant dark fantasy stories ranging from
Southern Gothic to street punk, full of sensual
detail, in Two Worlds and In Between, the
first of two planned ‘‘best of’’ volumes.
In Somewhere Beneath Those Waves, Sarah Monette is a master of
outsider art, with a series of vivid, emotional horror and dark fantasy
stories where misfit heroes deal with issues of entrapment, obligation,
identity, and healing. From ghost-kidnappers to adventurer poets,
The Bible Repairman and Other Stories by Tim Powers is rich and
strange, both literary and accessible. Bruce Sterling’s Gothic High-
Tech balances technology and the supernatural, politics and poetics,
the traditional gothic and the cyberpunk variant: Sterling tears it all
down and builds it back up again in an architectural/literary feat suited
to his status as maverick design theorist/SF author.
–Francesca Myman
aNTHOLOGIES
We’re recommending a total of 23 anthologies, up from last year’s 19. We
received 125, up from last year’s 121. [FULL DISCLOSURE: People on our
36 / LOCUS February 2012
reviewing panel have edited some of these anthologies.
They were not allowed to vote for their own
books and received no special treatment.]
We split the anthologies in the way we list
them, though not in the voting, between original,
reprint, and Year’s Best categories.
Original anthologies are the most important in
that they are a major source of new short fiction.
This year we saw 13, same as last year.
Horror and dark fantasy had a good showing,
with four notable original titles. One of the
highlights of Teeth: Vampire Tales edited by
Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling is Windling’s
introduction on the theme, this time pointing out
that the recent ‘‘vampire craze’’ actually began at least two centuries ago.
Speaking of vampires, Datlow edited another vampire-centric anthology
on our list, Blood and Other Cravings, which shifts the focus from more
traditional vampires to the idea of vampires, or ‘‘creatures which feed on
or crave a variety of essential substances, not just blood.’’ Subterranean: Tales
of Dark Fantasy 2 edited by William Schafer eschews defining ‘‘dark fantasy’’
as simply ‘‘horror,’’ giving the anthology a nice range. a Book of Horrors
edited by Stephen Jones rounds out our original horror set with this non-themed,
pure horror anthology featuring stories by some of the top names in the field.
Science fiction was nicely represented in original titles this year, with three
anthologies entirely devoted to the genre. Two have a central theme: Life on
Mars edited by Jonathan Strahan offers a fine selection of YA stories about
people living on Mars, and Technology Review: Science Fiction (or TRSF)
edited by Stephen Cass (MIT), a special all-SF anthology from the editors
of MIT’s Technology Review magazine, is filled with near-future stories
‘‘inspired by today’s emerging technologies.’’
Engineering Infinity also edited by Jonathan
Strahan is a boon for core science fiction fans,
with hard, soft, near-future, and far-future SF.
There were just two fantasy-only anthologies
on our list this year. Ellen Datlow’s Naked
City: Tales of Urban Fantasy features stories
that range from supernatural noir to paranormal
romance. Welcome to Bordertown: New
Stories and Poems of the Borderlands edited
by Holly Black & Ellen Kushner is the muchanticipated
return of this beloved shared-world
YA series. The title suggests a welcome not only
to a new generation of young readers, but also
to a new crop of writers, many of whom were
young-adult fans of the series when the previous installment was published
13 years ago.
The recent popularity of steampunk is reflected in not one, but three
steampunk-themed anthologies making the recommended cut. Kelly Link &
Gavin J. Grant’s Steampunk! is notable not only for featuring a new story by
Link herself (always a treat) but for containing a solid group of stories with
not one set in steampunk’s de rigueur setting of Victorian England. Ghosts
by Gaslight: Stories of Steampunk and Supernatural Suspense edited by
Jack Dann & Nick Gevers takes a narrower focus with a theme of Victorian
ghost stories combined with steampunk tech. There are,
however, a number of splendid ghost stories here that
lack the coppery tinge of steampunk. The Thackery
T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities edited by
Ann & Jeff VanderMeer uses the contents of a cabinet
of curiosities to serve as a jumping off
point for the wide variety of fictions and
artwork: steampunk, Lovecraftian horror,
metafiction, and more.
Eclipse Four edited by Jonathan
Strahan is the final original anthology,
with fantasy, science fiction, and
slipstream stories. The selection reflects
the editor’s personal tastes, and the result
is an enjoyably strong anthology.
We have three reprint anthologies to recommend this year,
starting with Happily Ever after edited by John Klima with fairy
tales fantastically retold by some of the biggest names in the field.
The Book of Cthulhu edited by Ross E. Lockhart features tales
by authors inspired by the Cthulhu mythos. The Weird edited by
Ann & Jeff VanderMeer is an immense work, featuring strange stories from
the last hundred years, some translated into English for the first time. Arranged
in chronological order, the collection gives the reader a sense of how the field
has developed over time.
The seven Year’s Bests on our list compile some of the best fiction of the

year, as defined by their editors. Two science fiction tomes, The Year’s Best
Science Fiction: Twenty-Eighth annual Collection edited by Gardner
Dozois and Year’s Best SF 16 edited by David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer
both offer the many fine examples we’ve come to expect. Rich Horton and
Jonathan Strahan combine SF and fantasy in their annuals, providing additional
highlights. The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume 22 edited by
Stephen Jones and Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year Volume Three
offer stories and a long ‘‘state of the horror field’’ report and ‘‘summation,’’
respectively, while The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2011 edited
by Paula Guran provides a selection of stories and a short introduction. To
divide the Year’s Best anthologies into their component parts, we have four
covering SF, two covering fantasy, and three covering horror.
– Heather Shaw
aRT BOOKS
It was a lean year for art books, with 12 to
recommend, down from 14 last year; we received
45, way down from 61, from US publishers and a
few from elsewhere.
There are five best-of titles to recommend this
year. Spectrum 18: The Best in Contemporary
Fantastic art continues the fine series edited by
Arnie Fenner & Cathy Fenner, with entries as
varied and evocative as ever, and 15 more pages
of art than last year. Masters of Science Fiction
& Fantasy art, edited by Karen Haber, is another
strong offering, creating a portrait of a vibrant
global art community in
a series of interviews with
28 artists from around the
world, each accompanied by step-by-step mini-tutorials
showing art from concept to finished execution.
Fantasy+ 3: Best Hand-Painted Illustrations, a
beautiful book edited by Vincent Zhao, includes 20
interviews with artists from eight countries, and is the
first major SF art anthology intended for a Western
audience that we’ve seen from China. It’s a good
year for Exposé 9: Finest Digital art in the Known
Universe, edited by Daniel Wade, with 444 pieces of
art by 327 artists from 60 countries: 10% more art
than any previous volume. Quality is also up, which is
particularly noticeable in the science fiction, fantasy,
and robotic/cyborg categories. Flesk Prime, edited by John Fleskes, offers
paintings and illustrations from five artists previously published by Flesk: Craig
Elliot, Gary Gianni, Petar Meseldžija, Mark Schultz, and William Stout. The
artists were invited to select their own favorite works for inclusion, resulting
in a small, but very fine best-of collection.
We have one themed collection on the list this year, Sketch Theatre:
Volume 1, edited by Liliana Feliciano, with striking dark fantasy and
horror sketches, illustrations, and paintings. The mission of the Sketch
Theatre collective is to ‘‘expose aspiring
artists to successful creative individuals
and the various career paths they have
taken,’’ and with 57 artists showcased
in the book, in careers from creature
development to art instruction, the group
achieves its goal.
We have four single-artist collections
to recommend. Hardware: The
Definitive SF Works of Chris Foss is an
impressive tribute to Foss’s organic, bulky,
scarred spacecrafts and alien architecture. His
methodology precedes the digital revolution, and
he continues to work by hand, though his influence
on the current generation of
digital artists is so pronounced that one at first assumes he’s
a digital artist himself. Jeffrey Jones: a Life in art, collects
Jeffrey Catherine Jones’s atmospheric, moody paintings
and sketches, many previously unpublished: barbarians and
leopards, enigmatic and powerful women, landscapes and
samples of comic art and covers. A fitting tribute to the life
of the artist, who died May 19, 2011.
Mark Schultz: Various Drawings Volume 5 is a slim
but action-packed volume. With giant bees, dinosaurs, and
machine-gun toting buxom wenches, this is a fun offering
from a top name in the comics field. The book continues
this year’s trend of showing work-in-progress side by side
with final art, an evolution from last year’s spate of how-
to books. Everyone wants to know how it’s done, and even books that don’t
include art instruction are much more inclined to reproduce first drafts and
concept sketches. This is true of the Jeffrey Jones collection as well: there was
a day when reproducing sketches in a full-blown art book was frowned upon,
but fortunately that is no longer the case.
a Tolkien Tapestry: Pictures to accompany
the Lord of the Rings by Cor Block includes
more than 100 illustrations by the Dutch artist
from the ’50s and ’60s. Block’s deceptively simple
illustrations, inspired by primitive art, medieval
tapestry, and the modernists, have graced the
covers of Tolkien’s books, but many are published
here for the first time.
One of our recommended books doesn’t fit into
any easy category. For those of us who couldn’t
travel to England to see the monumental 2011
British Library exhibition on science fiction, Out
of This World: Science Fiction But Not as You
Know It edited by Mike Ashley is the next best
thing. Teachers and librarians as well as casual readers should take note of
this combined reference and art book, which manages to cover six centuries
of speculative art from 1482 to the present, and includes a brief chronology
of the literature of wonder from 414 BCE to 2009.
–Francesca Myman
NON-FICTION
We’re recommending eight non-fiction titles, down from last year’s 11,
chosen from 74 (27 reference titles and 47 historical or critical volumes),
down from 76 (25 reference titles and 51 historical or critical volumes).
The recommendations include one autobiography: Nested Scrolls. In it,
Rudy Rucker narrates the story of his life from early childhood through the
present decade. He includes details about his experiences as a computer
hacker, punk rock musician, and mathematician,
as well as a science fiction author and member of
the cyperpunk circle of writers in the early 1980s.
There is one biographical work, Becoming Ray
Bradbury by Jonathan R. Eller, who has previously
written about and edited Bradbury’s work and cofounded
the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.
Eller chronicles the author’s early life, with a focus
on influences – literary, artistic, and cultural – that
shaped Bradbury’s interests and later works.
We also recommend five single-author essay
collections. Robert Silverberg’s Musings and
Meditations: Reflections on Science Fiction,
Science, and Other Matters collects
non-fiction work published from 1995-2010, and includes
discussions of SF as a genre, science, history, culture, and the
experiences of writing and being a writer. On the review side,
John Clute made the list for the second year in a row with
Pardon This Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm.
Featuring mostly recent work, it combines essays examining
the relationship between ‘‘fantastika’’ – Clute’s term for the
broad category sometimes labeled speculative fiction – and
the 21st-century world with a collection of pieces on specific
works, authors, and issues. There are two books by Gary K.
Wolfe: Sightings collects most of Wolfe’s review columns
for Locus from 2002-2006, and Evaporating Genres is a
group of essays focused on the evolving
parameters of and relationships between
SF, fantasy, and horror genres. We also recommend In
Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, a
collection by Margaret Atwood. It includes a series of
three previously unpublished Ellman Lectures
from 2010, plus reviews and essays describing
her perception of, and sometimes-controversial
relationship to the field.
Finally, there is Denying Science:
Conspiracy Theories, Media Distortions, and
the War against Reality by John Grant. Grant,
a science fiction author and editor as well as a
science writer, examines the general mistrust of
or outright disbelief in science encouraged by
contemporary culture and popular media, and advances some theories
as to why this should be the case.
–Chloe Smith
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� Rec’d Reading – Gary K. Wolfe
REaDING
THROUGH 2011
by Gary K. Wolfe
Rather to my own
amazement, I’ve been
writing these year-end
wrap-ups for 20 years
now – my first was in
1992 – and in glancing
over the earlier ones,
I’m not impressed.
Every year seems to
bring portents of doom,
but after a while they
get so confusing that
Gary K. Wolfe (2011)
it’s hard to tell the meteors
from the dinosaurs. For example, back when
I began, the meteor seemed to be the corporate
chains which were taking over the book business,
driving out the beloved independents and turning
the art of bookselling (and by extension, publishing)
into an impersonal, data-driven set of tracking
algorithms run by heartless accountants. But in the
past few years, those same chains, accountants and
all, have somehow become the dinosaurs, driven to
near-extinction by Amazon and other online sellers.
Then the print book itself became the dinosaur,
contentedly munching vegetation while the
e-reader loomed in the sky. But now that fearsome
meteor, the dedicated single-use e-reader,
is also looking like a dinosaur in the age of
the tablet; remember those early Sonys and
Cybooks? But in each of those 20 years of
apocalypse, we found good fiction – sometimes
shifting to small presses or online
’zines, to be sure, but still getting written and
still getting published and still finding readers.
It may just be that SF, fantasy, and horror
readers are more supportive of their genres
than the general reading public, and more
like a community, but I’m beginning to view
the ongoing crisis in terms borrowed from
one of the new TV series I enjoyed this year,
The Walking Dead: sure, the zombie apocalypse
has arrived, but we’ve got a farm.
So this year I’m forgoing any further speculations
on the state of the business, which others
can comment on far more knowledgeably anyway,
and looking at the past year simply as a kind of
narrative – a single reader’s sense of the eddies of
the field, largely based, as always, on the books
I’ve had a chance to review. In other words, this
is merely an impressionistic view of the year as I
experienced it.
I started this past year
with considerable enthusiasm
for three very different
novels by three very
different writers from different
generations: Gene
Wolfe (Home Fires), Jo
Walton (among Others),
and Graham Joyce (The
Silent Land). Wolfe
showed that an alreadylegendary
writer in his
80th year could return to
his SF roots with a standalone novel of characteristic
subtlety and grace, while Walton celebrated
the experience of reading SF and fantasy in a way
that rekindled familiar childhood discoveries, and
Joyce demonstrated once again that incisively
beautiful prose could make even familiar plots
seem new again. In brief, I started the year with
the optimistic feeling that the fantastic genres are
as good as they’ve ever been in purely literary
38 / LOCUS February 2012
terms, and this impression was reinforced by the
Year’s Best anthologies that came later (the first
I saw was from my colleague Jonathan Strahan, in
February), by the limited amount of original short
fiction I saw (including Jonathan’s own Eclipse
Four anthology), and by other late works from senior
authors, such as Richard Matheson’s Other
Kingdoms, Peter Beagle’s wonderful Sleight of
Hand collection, or the monumental first volume
of The Collected Stories of
Carol Emshwiller.
By February, though, my attention
was shifting to relatively
newer writers: a promising first
novel, Soft apocalypse by Will
McIntosh (from Night Shade,
which has begun to make something
of a specialty of finding
new writers), and a third youngadult
novel, akata Witch from
Nnedi Okorafor, who would later
that year win a World Fantasy
Award for her adult novel Who
Fears Death? Around the same
time I read Johanna Sinisalo’s astonishingly eerie
Birdbrain and Margo Lanagan’s new collection
Yellowcake. All three books called attention to the
globalization of the field, to the continually growing
importance of YA fiction, and to the fact that
the US is only one node of an increasingly diversified
publishing world (I don’t think the Lanagan
collection is even now available in
the US). The central significance
of YA fiction was reinforced later
in the year by Goliath, the final
volume in Scott Westerfeld’s hugely
enjoyable steampunk-primer
Leviathan trilogy, and by the first
volume of Ian McDonald’s first
and very promising venture into
YA, Planesrunner. The fact that
US or UK publishing is no longer
required to give a book legitimacy
is underlined not only by Lanagan,
but by Australian publishers such
as Ticonderoga, which published
one of the year’s most important retrospectives,
Lucy Sussex’s Matilda Told Such Dreadful
Lies, or Twelfth Planet, whose program (including
Sussex, Tansy Rayner Roberts, and Deborah
Biancotti) earned its publisher Alisa Krasnostein a
World Fantasy Award.
With both senior and newer writers obviously
doing well, it was a pleasure to discover, in late
spring and early summer, that some of the most
anticipated books from current high-profile mainstays
fulfilled their promise. China Miéville’s
Embassytown represented his first full foray into
SF, and, though perhaps a bit leisurely in establishing
its setting, proved to be one of the year’s
most intellectually provocative novels, echoing
aspects of Delany, Vance, and
M. John Harrison. The set-up also
proved challenging in Greg Egan’s
The Clockwork Rocket, the first
of his Orthogonal trilogy – he introduced
a whole alternative physics,
then painstakingly led us through his
heroine’s scientific education in this
world – but by the end he’d created
perhaps his most complex female
character and the promise of a suspenseful
world-saving narrative arc.
On a somewhat lighter note, Michael
Swanwick finally gave us the Darger
& Surplus novel we’d been hoping
for in Dancing With Bears, which managed to
be a suspenseful and intricate novel without sac-
rificing the wackiness of the stories (though it did
sacrifice some of the excellent banter by separating
the pair for much of the novel). Robert Charles
Wilson’s Vortex proved a satisfying conclusion to
the trilogy that began with Spin, and in the process
offered an interesting approach to the trilogy
as a form, essentially reconceiving the premises
from different points of view in each volume rather
than following a single set of characters through
a single narrative arc. And by late summer
Kathleen Ann Goonan, in her passionate,
deeply thoughtful, and almost idealistic This
Shared Dream, followed up her earlier In
War Time, again reconceiving the terms of
the earlier novel in interesting ways.
So by mid-year I was feeling that, in its
fundamentals, the field is still in pretty good
shape – established writers are continuing to
provoke in interesting ways, new writers are
testing the waters, veterans are showing us
the fruits of impressive careers, and no one
has jumped the shark (although I confess to
worrying about the opening chapters of the
Egan). But I was also aware that there were a
number of books that I couldn’t finish, even though
some were well reviewed by others, and many others
that I simply didn’t see. I was also barely aware
of what was going on in the biggest economic
engine associated with the field, and hardly read
anything about the stumbling dead (‘‘walking’’
is just too generous) or the horny undead. But, it
turned out, there were surprises even here: On the
strength of Daryl Gregory’s name, I picked up the
zombie novel Raising Stony Mayhall and found it
surprisingly moving, despite (or perhaps because
of) its buying into the Romero mythology full-tilt
and somehow creating a highly personal family
drama out of these familiar materials. One of the
things you learn from Gregory and other writers
who have done similar things is that no trope, from
space wars to zombie apocalypses, ever quite gets
done to death or becomes
so hackneyed that it can’t
generate provocative
and original treatments.
They’ve become part of
the palette of what John
Clute calls fantastika, and
if you’re not clear on what
that is, the year also saw
Clute’s most accessible
book of critical essays yet,
Pardon This Intrusion:
Fantastika in the World
Storm, which came to me
in midsummer. At the risk
of rooting for the home team, I liked it a good deal
more than Margaret Atwood’s In Other Worlds:
SF and the Human Imagination, which arrived
a month or so later. Clute, as always, shows us invigorating
ways of reading SF, or of using SF to
read the world, while Atwood mostly displays
her own limited reading in the field,
although in a determinedly cordial tone.
By late summer, I usually have a
healthy pile of books on my table that I
haven’t quite gotten around to, but that I
don’t want to file away just yet because
they were clearly worth reading eventually.
Almost everyone I know who reads
widely in the field has such a ‘‘to-read’’
pile, and while it’s always frustrating, it
leads to a petulant feeling that there is
just too much of this stuff, and why don’t
they slow down? But then you come
across writers who don’t seem to write
quite enough, and late summer brought story collections
from Tim Powers (The Bible Repairman

and Other Stories) and Geoff Ryman (Paradise
Tales). Both are principally novelists, so you can’t
blame them for the relatively slight output of short
fiction, but both volumes illustrated the
principle that story collections, apart
from their own value, can be an important
way of keeping readers intrigued
between the novels. Powers’s collection
includes ‘‘A Time to Cast Away
Stones,’’ which serves as both a backstory
and a kind of preview of his return
to 19th-century venues in this year’s
Hide Me among the Graves.
But there are times when a certain
degree of exhaustion inevitably sets in,
and a deadline looms. Probably the last
thing you need arriving on your doorstep
when that happens is a thousand-page novel
by anyone, and Neal Stephenson’s Reamde isn’t
even fantastic fiction by any reasonable standard –
though he keeps you waiting for a tipping point for
hundreds of pages – but by the time I finished it I
was ready to defend the thousand-page novel as a
narrative form. Stephenson writes long, as he readily
admits, but his novels also are just terrific, and
I spent some time responding to those who complained
about its length to the effect that, for heaven’s
sake, look at the page counts of The Count of
Monte Cristo or Les Miserables. Why shouldn’t
‘‘our’’ writers have the same freedom of detail, if
they can bring it off as well as Stephenson does?
Or for that matter, if our writers choose to employ
a fragmented, distributed narrative technique such
as Christopher Priest does in The Islanders, which
I read the following month, why shouldn’t they? I
liked that novel – in which Priest explores in detail
a setting he’s used on and off for most of his career
– more than some others seemed to, but in a few
cases I discovered they had assumed that Priest
was off playing in Calvino fields before they got
far enough in to realize the tricky, contorted plot he
was constructing.
In October, one of the most valuable resources
for anyone who works with SF, The Science
Fiction Encyclopedia, became available online in
a ‘‘beta’’ edition – meaning that it’s not quite yet
fully updated from the invaluable second edition
2011: aNOTHER YEaR IN POSSIBILITY
by Faren Miller
Looking back over the areas where I did most of
my reading and reviewing (fantasy and first novels),
I scribbled notes on a variety of topics but looked
in vain for something to connect them all until a
stanza from Emily Dickinson came to mind:
I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –
Even back in the 1860s Emily didn’t have
the place entirely to herself, for in that same
decade Lewis Carroll wandered in with prose as
Faren Miller (2006)
unexpected as his verse.
But a decade-plus into the 21st century, what she
called House and he dubbed Wonderland have become
a multiverse where the fantastic may mingle with
elements of science, mystery, the avant garde/surreal...
and show the lyrical power of the best literature.
Whether you call it breadth, fluidity, or sophistication
(without snooty airs), it already shows up in debut
novels, including The Traitor’s Daughter by Paula
Brandon, Of Blood and Honey by Stina Leicht, Low
Town by Daniel Polansky, Mechanique by Genevieve
Valentine, and The Courier’s New Bicycle by Kim
Westwood. To these from the official list, I’d add Songs
of the Earth by Elspeth Cooper (Gollancz) and The
of 1993 or the somewhat expanded CD-ROM edition
of 1995. It won’t be a complete third edition
until the end of next year, according to the website,
but it already contains more than
twice the word counts of those earlier
editions, and it’s already invaluable for
consulting on specific topics, although
its browseability could use some tweaking.
Affiliated with Gollancz, its appearance
roughly coincided with the
launch, a couple of months earlier, of
Gollancz’s own SF Gateway project,
which intends to make available online
editions of the backlists of every SF author
they can get their hands on (meaning
e-rights clearances for). Already it’s
a useful alternative to tracking down
tattered old paperbacks, but unfortunately only
about a third of the titles are available in the US
and Canada. Still, it’s an encouraging sign that SF
backlists, most of which had all but disappeared,
are gradually becoming available again.
Toward the end of the year, with advance deadlines
and such, I usually find myself reading
into early the following year, but the last three
December titles I covered all seemed to illustrate
one of the qualities I’ve come to value most
in writers I admire, which is simply the capacity
for surprise – not in terms of plots, but in
terms of careers. I’ve already mentioned
Ian McDonald’s Planesrunner, which
showed that a writer known for his complexly
textured futures could also write
a straight-ahead YA adventure in a world
both conceptually intriguing and immediately
accessible, and Daryl Gregory’s
Raising Stony Mayhall, which was as different
from his first two novels as they were
from each other. His first story collection,
Unpossible and Other Stories, held few
real surprises (I’d read most of the stories
already), but reminded me of the remarkable
short fiction which had initially established
his reputation – and indirectly, of how surprising
his novels were when they appeared. It also
reinforced an argument that I’ve probably flogged
to death every time I review a story collection –
namely, that you can’t assume you know an author
from novels alone, or from short fiction alone (I
said something along these lines in reviewing the
Kiernan and Emshwiller collections). This notion
was reinforced again by Peter Straub’s The Ballad
of Ballard and Sandrine, which appeared earlier
in the year in Conjunctions and at the end of the
year as a standalone novella. It may be that Straub’s
truly weirdest fiction has shown up in novellas, and
it seems fair to say that nothing in his novels will
quite prepare the reader for this strange journey.
I know there are many intelligent and informed
readers and fans who know what they want and
want more of it, but I’m always impressed when
a writer I thought I knew pretty well surprises me.
That doesn’t mean you can’t write series novels;
George R.R. Martin’s deservedly celebrated Song
of Ice and Fire, which reached its fifth volume this
year with a Dance of Dragons, is well known for
its reversals, shifts of point of view, and general
rug-pulling, all within the same fictive world.
But that, unfortunately, takes me into the territory
of regrets: all the books I didn’t get to, for reasons
that have nothing to do with their quality or
significance. Paradoxically, there are times when
I wish I didn’t review books so that I’d have time
to read entirely on whim – but I’m pretty sure I’d
end up as one of those people with massive ‘‘toread’’
piles at the end of every year
(I’ve got a large enough pile as is).
Monthly reviewing, though, keeps
tossing up these wonderful epiphanies.
I began the year delighted
by Jo Walton and ended up being
surprised by an old friend, Peter
Straub, with quite a few discoveries
in between – some of which I
might never have picked up entirely
on my own. If you put all the cataclysmic
metaphors about the state
of the industry aside for a moment,
grim as they may be, you have to
admit that a field which can offer
such a variety of surprises in a single year has a
lot going for it.
–Gary K. Wolfe
Taker by Alma Katsu (Gallery). Brandon, Polansky, and Valentine all bring
fantastical elements into their SF, while Polansky and Westwood add more than
a pinch of noir detective fiction, and Cooper and Katsu are outstanding stylists.
My favorite fantasies from 2010 all ignore the
perceived boundaries and limits of genre. It’s a Top
Three: a Dance With Dragons by George R.R.
Martin, The Folded World by Catherynne M. Valente,
and (unfortunately absent from the main list) Out of
Oz by Gregory Maguire (Morrow). Each is a sequel,
in a time when multi-volume fantasies have managed
to achieve or surpass the quality of standalones –
see below for further evidence of this – but in most
respects, they’re quite different.
Martin continues to interweave his version of
English warring families the Yorks and Lancasters,
those historic inspirations for work by the likes of
Shakespeare, with fantastical elements. Despite the
new book’s extraordinary length (over a thousand pages), huge cast, and
thematic scope (room to explore politics, psychology, cultures, et al.), the
action never dulls and the magic stays alive. Other effective sequels in the epic
vein include Daniel Abraham’s The Dragon’s Path and Daniel Fox’s Hidden
Cities, with their own takes on mythical flying lizards. And while Patrick
Rothfuss’s The Wise Man’s Fear devotes a page-count greater than Martin’s
to what would seem to be a much narrower subject – bildungsroman, further
episodes in the autobiography of a retired warrior-mage too sensible to see
himself as a hero – Rothfuss manages to bring that off with never a dull moment.
Valente introduced her extraordinary variations on the medieval legends of
Prester John in 2010 with The Habitation of the Blessed, and continues in
�
LOCUS February 2012 / 39

� Rec’d Reading – Faren Miller
The Folded World (reviewed in this issue). Other writers have created a sense
of epic scope by jumping between the viewpoints of multiple characters with
parts in a greater saga, but she seems unique in her ability to reconceive the very
nature of Book and Story, Truth and Lie, and the meaning – if any – of Life.
Although none of the other fantasies really compare with hers, a similar
audacity marks The Wicked Years, Gregory Maguire’s tetralogy concluding
with Out of Oz. Over the course of this project, he has transformed L. Frank
Baum’s well-loved tales of Oz into a complex, contrarian world for today’s
adult reader, where neither the scenario nor the cast have the recycled feel of
pastiche. One minor aspect of the final volume (a reluctant Dorothy, back in our
world in the early 1900s) does connect with an active trend in genre fiction: the
growing number of writers who reject both standard fantasy’s epic-medieval
backgrounds and the far-future distant planets once so prevalent in SF, in favor
of settings much closer (in space and time) to home.
On the current recommended lists, this preference is most
obvious in standalone novels. Ian R. Macleod brings an
alt-world science-fiction take to the Forties detective novel
and Hollywood’s film industry in Wake Up and Dream. In
fantasy, Daryl Gregory bases the even darker USA of Raising
Stony Mayhall on sixties zombie horror film Night of the
Living Dead, first-novelist Stina Leicht combines the political
violence of seventies Ireland with a lingering presence of Fae
in Of Blood and Honey, and Tim Pratt finds paths to many
strange realms in the contemporary Bay Area of Briarpatch.
And that’s not all. Going back the cusp of the 19th and 20th
centuries, Andrea Hairston’s Redwood and Wildfire brings
such historic elements as post-Reconstruction racism and
traveling vaudeville players to her version of the fantastic.
2011: YEaR IN
REVIEW
by Jonathan Strahan
Some things only
become clear when
you can look back on
them and gain a little
perspective. That’s
how I feel about my
reading in 2011. I spent
so much time reading –
either coordinating and
editing book reviews
for Locus or reading
Jonathan Strahan (2010)
for my best of the year
anthology and other
projects – that I haven’t had time to try to consider
how good or bad a year it might have been. I spent
the time between December and March furiously
reading novels, and the rest of the year reading
short fiction. It’s productive, but hardly conducive
to developing a feel for the year as a whole.
Nonetheless, looking back at it 2011, I can’t help
but feel that it was a good all-round year for science
fiction and fantasy, but not a great one. As I often
find, there was small handful of novels that really
stood out for me and a group of very enjoyable and
worthwhile novels that I think you might appreciate
too. There were also some wonderful collections
and anthologies, some interesting non-fiction, and
a slew of short stories that deserve your attention.
The three standout novels of 2011 – one
fantasy, one science fiction, and one (arguably)
horror – were very different sorts of books. Jo
Walton’s among Others is a powerful semiautobiographical
novel about a young girl growing
up in Wales, damaged by her mother’s magic but
saved by her deep love of science fiction. It might be
because I’m almost exactly the same age as Walton
and read many of the same books at the same age as
she and her character did, but I found her portrayal
of falling in love with SF to be note perfect. It’s one
of the finest love letters to the genre I’ve read. The
other book, Ian McDonald’s Planesrunner, is a
thrilling multidimensional romp that starts a few
years from now when young Everett Singh sees
his father kidnapped on the street right in front of
40 / LOCUS February 2012
him, spends some time in the most exhilaratingly
wonderful steampunk universe I’ve encountered,
and ends in the first moments of a new adventure.
McDonald has long since established his writing
chops, but Planesrunner shows that he is capable
of putting as much fun on the page as any other
writer we have. Patrick Ness’s a Monster Calls
is the beautifully nuanced, harrowing story of a
boy whose mother is dying of cancer. The boy is
visited by a monster that tells him that it will visit
him four times: three times it will tell him a story,
and on the fourth the boy must tell it his story or
die. It’s dark and mournful, but also uplifting and
wonderful. The illustrations by Jim Kay are equal to
the superb story and deserve to be on every possible
major awards ballot this year.
There came a point
during 2011 where, more
than anything else, I found
myself craving some real
centre-of-the-genre stories,
ones that delivered the
thrills and pay-offs I love
from science fiction and
fantasy, and Daniel Abraham
came through twice. As part
of the James S.A. Corey
writing team, Abraham and
his collaborator Ty Franck
produced in Leviathan
Wakes the kind of SF novel I’d been craving. Fast
paced-adventure, hard science, great characters,
and all in a believable-enough future that I didn’t
need to question it too closely, Leviathan Wakes
was a classic SF thrill-ride, and I’m waiting
eagerly for the sequel. I was almost equally taken
with Abraham’s solo effort, fantasy novel The
Dragon’s Path, which follows somewhat in the
path of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and
Fire, but is enough its own master to be rewarding.
While it probably could have been a little shorter,
something true of most epic fantasy, it overcame the
reservations I had at the beginning of the book to
take its place among my favourite novels of the year.
I suspect many Terry Pratchett fans have
wondered when the toll of his widely reported illness
will finally impact on his writing. It’s something
My other personal addition to the list in this category,
Melissa Marr’s Graveminder (published, like the
Maguire, by Morrow), takes place in a small town
set apart from a relatively modern America by weird
traditions that look back toward the Gothic, even as
some characters strive to escape from them.
Finally, brief comments on some other books and
forms; despite setting Embassytown on a distant
alien world, China Mieville turns the SF here to his
own devices. In humorous fantasy, the series may
predominate but attitude can range from Gail Carriger’s
witty return to vampire-Victorian London in Heartless
to the deliberately adolescent themes and language of
Snuff, Terry Pratchett’s account of a boy’s trek into
Discworld’s woods and wilds. Though I saw little of the official YA list, Frances
Hardinge’s Twilight Robbery/Fly Trap was a fine addition to the field. I’m
still eagerly awaiting a chance to catch up with Phillip Reeve’s latest
in the saga of Fever Crumb, Scrivener’s Moon.
In shorter fiction, 2011 was a good year for collections: along with
listed ones by Peter Beagle, Gwyneth Jones, and Leigh Kennedy,
I recommend the new Sarah Monette (reviewed in this issue). In
anthologies, Naked City edited by Ellen Datlow, and Happily Ever
after edited by John Klima, both showcase authors who continue to
find their own paths through the ostensibly familiar: in the relatively
recent form of urban fantasy, and the fairy tale’s far older modes of Story.
While doomsayers may continue to predict the death of the printed
word, speculative fiction’s vast domains of Possibility remain open to
the explorer.
– Faren Miller
that is impossible to know,
and a conversation I have
little appetite for. I was
delighted with the latest
Discworld instalment,
Snuff, which takes Sam
Vimes from his beloved
Ankh-Morpork and plonks
him bang in the middle
of the countryside. While
I think observations that
Vimes is becoming far too
much of an everyman hero
for every occasion have
merit, and I did find the book slipping in and out
of focus a little, I remain as eager as ever for
what Pratchett will do next.
While those were my favourite novels of the
year, they weren’t the only books I read or loved
during 2011. China Mieville’s Embassytown,
a space opera about language, was slightly
less fun than Kraken, which I loved, but was
genuinely a terrific read. Charles Stross’s nearfuture
SF police procedural, Rule 34, was his
best and most complete novel to date, and
shows that this important and always interesting
writer is continuing to grow and evolve. I also
loved Michael Swanwick’s Darger & Surplus
novel, Dancing with Bears, which was dark
and funny and weird: possibly Swanwick’s
most enjoyable novel to date, and one that deserves
a much larger audience.
I read more SF and YA novels than fantasy during
the year, but when I did turn to fantasy I found
myself really taken with the drift in modern fantasy
swords-and-sorcery-wards with Joe Abercrombie’s
dark, visceral and violent The Heroes, one of my
picks for best fantasy novel of the year, and Richard
K. Morgan’s darkly weird The Cold Commands,
which proved to be a wonderful follow-up to The
Steel Remains from a couple years ago. I was
delighted to see Lisa Goldstein return to form with
her best novel in years, The Uncertain Places,
which was nothing like the Abercrombie or Morgan
books at all, but nonetheless belongs on the list of
fantasies of the year for me. Catherynne M. Valente
published a handful of excellent novels and short

stories during 2011, and almost all of them would
repay your attention. For my money, the best of her
novels was the darkly wonderful Deathless, which
arrived early in the year, but I only read near year’s
end. I was also impressed with Helen Oyeyemi’s
Mr. Fox, Libba Bray’s enormously fun Beauty
Queens, and K.J. Parker’s The Hammer.
Young-adult fiction is aimed at readers of
about 13 and up, and typically features a young
protagonist, but that’s about all that separates it
from all of the other books on our list. Both of
my top two novels are either unashamedly YA
(Planesrunner) or arguably YA (among Others),
and both could readily appear in ‘‘adult’’ categories.
The same is true of most of the books I’m about to
discuss. Nnedi Okorafor’s astounding run continued
in 2011 with the publication of akata Witch, the
story of an American-born girl living in Nigeria
who suddenly discovers she has amazing magical
powers – which I confess I liked even better than her
World Fantasy Award-winning Who Fears Death.
Delia Sherman took a quantum leap beyond her
other recent novels, which were highly enjoyable,
to produce a book that I suspect will be read for
many, many years to come in the dramatic and
sensitive coming-of-age story, The Freedom Maze.
It’s a marvelous book that I expect to see on major
awards ballots throughout 2012. I also fell in love
with Frances Hardinge’s Twilight Robbery, the
sequel to her award winning debut Fly-by-Night.
Hardinge is the heir to Joan Aiken, and probably
the finest writer for younger readers working in
the UK today. I discovered Philip Reeve’s Fever
Crumb novels while starting to listen to audiobooks
earlier in the year. I stumbled across a recording of
the author reading the opening novel in the series
and was instantly entranced by his telling of the
adventures of young Fever, her protector
Kit Solent, and the coming of the terrible
scriveners. I followed it with the audiobook
of Web of air and then the print version of
Scrivener’s Moon. It’s wonderful science
fiction adventure of a steampunkish sort,
and totally worth seeking out. I loved the
last book in Scott Westerfeld’s steampunk
trilogy, Goliath. Westerfeld does a terrific
job closing out the story, and Keith
Thompson’s artwork is wonderful. Finally,
the third book in Clive Barker’s Abarat
series, absolute Midnight, came out to
almost no fanfare at all. An enormously
heavy book, printed on lovely paper, and filled with
Barker’s grotesque art, it was a great continuation
of the series that takes us closer to the end of Cindy
Quackenbush’s adventures in Abarat, and deserves
to be read and discussed more widely.
Such is the state of short science fiction and
fantasy that I’m no longer sure whether it makes
any sense to call a year good or bad anymore. As has
been the case for some years, a staggering quantity
of short fiction was published in an ever more
impossible-to-keep-track-of variety of venues. I
did feel there were fewer really brilliant stories
published, but there were still more than enough
excellent ones to keep even the pickiest readers
satisfied. The single best collection of 2011 was
Caitlín R. Kiernan’s Two Worlds and in Between,
the first of two career-retrospective volumes to
gather together Kiernan’s best short fiction. The
stories, which were originally published between
1995 and 2005, show the strength and diversity of
her work. Perhaps even more impressive, given
the strength of this book, is that her short fiction
has become even more accomplished in recent
years, something that bodes well for Volume 2
(tentatively due in 2014). There were three other
outstanding career retrospectives published in
2011. Carol Emshwiller’s The Collected Stories
of Carol Emshwiller: Volume 1 was also the first
volume of two, and again highlighted the work of
an extraordinary writer. Pleasingly, Lucy Sussex’s
Matilda Told Such Dreadful Lies: The Essential
Lucy Sussex, served to correct the lack of attention
this major Australian writer has received in recent
years. And finally, Multiples, the sixth volume
of the Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg was
published late in the year, and included some of
his best and most famous stories from the 1980s.
While those were the best career retrospective
or best-of collections, there were a number
of outstanding original collections published
during the year. Probably the best of these
was Maureen McHugh’s excellent after the
apocalypse. A follow-up to her Story Prize
finalist collection Mothers & Other Monsters,
after the apocalypse was equally strong and
featured the exceptional new title story, which
was one of the year’s best. Also impressive, and
also from Small Beer Press, Geoff Ryman’s new
collection Paradise Tales collected 16 astonishing,
disorienting, and powerful stories that underscored
just how marvellous a writer Ryman can be. Peter
S. Beagle ‘‘returned’’ to short fiction in the mid-
2000s and has steadily built himself into one of
our leading short story writers. Sleight of Hand,
his seventh collection, collects the latest sampling
of this bounty and featured two very strong new
stories, ‘‘The Woman Who Married the Man
in the Moon’’ and ‘‘The Bridge Partner’’. Only
published in Australia to date, Margo Lanagan’s
fourth collection, Yellowcake, was a worthy follow
up to Red Spikes from the prolific and consistently
outstanding Lanagan. Another of her collections
can’t be far away either. Also excellent were
Gwyneth Jones’s The Universe of Things and
Tim Powers’s The Bible Repairman
and Other Stories. Finally, Tansy
Rayner Roberts’s all-original debut
collection Love and Romanpunk,
was a marvellous introduction to a
talented writer from an exciting new
Australian press that included ‘‘The
Patrician’’, one of the year’s best
stories.
As a jobbing anthologist there
are all sorts of conflicts of interest
when discussing the anthologies of
the year, so I shall simply note that
I worked on the anthologies Eclipse
Four, Engineering Infinity, Life
on Mars, and The Best Science Fiction and
Fantasy of the Year: Volume 5 on which I shall
comment no further. For my money the anthology
of the year was, hands down, Gavin Grant &
Kelly Link’s Steampunk! an anthology of
Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories. I have
no idea whether or not it was good steampunk, but
it was great fiction, with literally no weak stories,
and standouts from Libba Bray, Dylan Horrocks,
and others. I was also impressed with Stephen
Cass’s TRSF, an anthology/annual issue of SF
from MIT’s Technology Review. From the slightly
darker side of the genre, I greatly enjoyed Ghosts
by Gaslight, Jack Dann and Nick Gevers’s foray
into spooky steampunk; Ellen Datlow’s Blood
and Other Cravings, Supernatural Noir, Naked
City, and Teeth; and Ross Lockhart’s The Book
of Cthulhu. Also notable was Holly Black and
Ellen Kushner’s Welcome to Bordertown, the
first new collection of Bordertown fiction in over
a decade. Finally Ann & Jeff VanderMeer edited
two very fine books this year. The Thackery T.
Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities was a suitably
diverse and strange volume and a fine follow-up to
their first Lambshead book, while their enormous
anthology The Weird will likely remain THE
definitive anthology of weird fiction for years to
come.
I read even less genre
non-fiction in 2011
than I did in 2010, but
I did enjoy and would
highly recommend
my close friend and
colleague Gary K.
Wolfe’s two books,
Sightings: Reviews
2002-2006 a n d
Evaporating Genres:
Essays of Fantastic
Literature. T h e
first collects reviews
written during my tenure as Locus’s reviews editor,
while the latter is a new collection of essays. While
I am terribly biased, they both show to me why
Wolfe is one of our leading critics. I also read
Margaret Atwood’s In Other Worlds: SF and
the Human Imagination. I remain unsure if this
is a recommendable book or not, but it certainly
provoked more discussion than any other during
2011. Finally, something that doesn’t quite fit: this
year saw the release of the beta edition of the 3rd
edition of The Science Fiction Encyclopaedia by
John Clute, David Langford, & Graham Sleight.
Not a book, and hence outside the remit of both
our recommended reading list and most of the
field’s awards, and arguably not published as it
comprises a beta edition, it nonetheless contained
an extraordinary volume of new SF scholarship and
undoubtedly will become the primary SF resource
on and off the web in coming years. It strongly
deserves your attention.
There were many encouraging things about
2011, from the growing focus on diversity in
science fiction to the explosion in e-reading and
the rise of a new generation of writers like An
Owomayela and Ken Liu. It all continues to bode
well for the future of our field. And, with that, my
top lists for the year, as once-required by Charles
Brown, whom I still think rather enjoyed them:
Top 10 11 Books
Planesrunner, Ian McDonald
among Others, Jo Walton
a Monster Calls, Patrick Ness
Two Worlds and in Between,
Caitlin R. Kiernan,
akata Witch, Nnedi Okorafor
The Freedom Maze, Delia Sherman
The Heroes, Joe Abercrombie
after the apocalypse, Maureen McHugh
Leviathan Wakes, James S.A. Corey
The Dragon Path, Daniel Abraham
Steampunk! an anthology of Fantastically
Rich and Strange Stories,
Gavin Grant & Kelly Link, eds.
Top 10 Stories
(in alphabetical order by author)
‘‘The Last Ride of the Glory Girls’’, Libba Bray
‘‘The Adakian Eagle’’, Bradley Denton
‘‘The Man Who Bridged the Mist’’, Kij Johnson
‘‘The Maltese Unicorn’’, Caitlín R Kiernan
‘‘Tidal Forces’’, Caitlín R Kiernan
‘‘The Choice’’, Paul McAuley
‘‘A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong’’,
K. J. Parker
‘‘What We Found’’, Geoff Ryman
‘‘The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine’’,
Peter Straub
‘‘White Lines on a Green Field’’,
Catherynne M. Valente
–Jonathan Strahan
�
LOCUS February 2012 / 41

2011 Recommended Reading List
Daybreak Zero, John Barnes (Ace)
Grail, Elizabeth Bear (Spectra)
Leviathan Wakes, James S.A. Corey (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
The Clockwork Rocket, Greg Egan (Night Shade)
This Shared Dream, Kathleen Ann Goonan (Tor)
7th Sigma, Steven Gould (Tor)
Deadline, Mira Grant (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
Earthbound, Joe Haldeman (Ace)
11/22/63, Stephen King (Scribner; Hodder & Stoughton as
11.22.63)
Wake Up and Dream, Ian R. MacLeod (PS)
Firebird, Jack McDevitt (Ace)
The Heroes, Joe Abercrombie (Gollancz; Orbit US)
The Dragon’s Path, Daniel Abraham (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
Heartless, Gail Carriger (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
The Fallen Blade, Jon Courtenay Grimwood (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
Hidden Cities, Daniel Fox (Del Rey)
The Uncertain Places, Lisa Goldstein (Tachyon)
Raising Stony Mayhall, Daryl Gregory (Del Rey)
The Magician King, Lev Grossman (Viking)
Redwood and Wildfire, Andrea Hairston (Aqueduct)
The Kingdom of Gods, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
The Alchemists of Kush, Minister Faust (Narmer’s Palette)
A Dance with Dragons, George R.R. Martin (Bantam;
Harper Voyager UK)
The Cold Commands, Richard K. Morgan (Del Rey; Gollancz)
Abarat: Absolute Midnight, Clive Barker (Harper;
HarperCollins UK)
The Mostly True Story of Jack, Kelly Barnhill (Little, Brown)
Chime, Franny Billingsley (Dial)
Red Glove, Holly Black (McElderry)
Beauty Queens, Libba Bray (Scholastic Press)
Eona, Alison Goodman (Viking; Angus & Roberson)
Twilight Robbery, Frances Hardinge (Macmillan;
Harper as Fly Trap)
The Shattering, Karen Healey (Allen & Unwin; Little, Brown)
Huntress, Malinda Lo (Little, Brown)
Planesrunner, Ian McDonald (Pyr)
A Monster Calls, Patrick Ness (Walker UK; Candlewick)
Akata Witch, Nnedi Okorafor (Viking)
Beka Cooper: Mastiff, Tamora Pierce (Random House)
Debris, Jo Anderton (Angry Robot US; Angry Robot UK)
The Girl of Fire and Thorns, Rae Carson (Greenwillow;
Gollancz as Fire and Thorns)
Ready Player One, Ernest Cline (Crown; Century)
God’s War, Kameron Hurley (Night Shade)
The Desert of Souls, Howard Andrew Jones
(St. Martin's)
Of Blood and Honey, Stina Leicht (Night Shade)
Soft Apocalypse, Will McIntosh (Night Shade)
The Monkey’s Wedding and Other Stories, Joan Aiken
(Small Beer)
The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson, Volume 4:
Admiralty, Poul Anderson (NESFA)
Sleight of Hand, Peter S. Beagle (Tachyon)
TVA Baby, Terry Bisson (PM)
When the Great Days Come, Gardner Dozois (Prime)
42 / LOCUS February 2012
Novels – Science Fiction
Novels – Fantasy
Young Adult Books
First Novels
Collections
Embassytown, China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan)
All the Lives He Led, Frederik Pohl (Tor)
The Islanders, Christopher Priest (Gollancz)
Enigmatic Pilot, Kris Saknussemm (Del Rey)
Heart of Iron, Ekaterina Sedia (Prime)
Rule 34, Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit UK)
Dancing With Bears, Michael Swanwick (Night Shade)
The Children of the Sky, Vernor Vinge (Tor)
The Courier’s New Bicycle, Kim Westwood (Voyager Australia)
Zone One, Colson Whitehead (Doubleday; Harvill Secker)
Vortex, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor)
Home Fires, Gene Wolfe (Tor; PS)
Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D’Urbervilles,
Kim Newman (Titan)
The Book of Transformations, Mark Charan Newton (Tor UK)
Mr. Fox, Helen Oyeyemi (Picador UK; Riverhead)
The Hammer, K.J. Parker (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
Briarpatch, Tim Pratt (ChiZine)
Snuff, Terry Pratchett (Harper; Doubleday UK)
The River of Shadows, Robert V.S. Redick (Del Rey; Gollancz)
The Wise Man’s Fear, Patrick Rothfuss (DAW; Gollancz)
Deathless, Catherynne M. Valente (Tor)
The Folded World, Catherynne M. Valente (Night Shade)
Among Others, Jo Walton (Tor)
Mistification, Kaaron Warren (Angry Robot UK;
Angry Robot US)
Scrivener’s Moon, Philip Reeve (Marion Lloyd)
Across the Universe, Beth Revis (Razorbill)
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Ransom Riggs
(Quirk)
The Freedom Maze, Delia Sherman (Big Mouth House)
The Highest Frontier, Joan Slonczewski (Tor)
Daughter of Smoke & Bone, Laini Taylor (Little, Brown;
Hodder & Stoughton)
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her
Own Making, Catherynne M. Valente (Feiwel and Friends)
The Boy at the End of the World, Greg van Eekhout
(Bloomsbury USA)
Goliath, Scott Westerfeld (Simon Pulse; Simon & Schuster UK)
Across the Great Barrier, Patricia C. Wrede (Scholastic Press)
The Space Between, Brenna Yovanoff (Razorbill)
The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern (Doubleday)
The Tiger’s Wife, Téa Obreht (Random House;
Weidenfeld & Nicholson)
Low Town, Daniel Polansky (Doubleday; Hlodder & Stoughton as
Low Town: The Straight Razor Cure)
Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti,
Genevieve Valentine (Prime)
Blood Red Road, Moira Young (McElderry; Marion Lloyd)
Seed, Rob Ziegler (Night Shade)
The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Volume 1,
Carol Emshwiller (Nonstop)
Unpossible and Other Stories, Daryl Gregory (Fairwood)
The Inheritance, Robin Hobb/Megan Lindholm
(Harper Voyager UK; Harper Voyager US)
The Universe of Things, Gwyneth Jones (Aqueduct)
Wind Angels, Leigh Kennedy (PS)

Two Worlds and In Between, Caitlín R. Kiernan (Subterranean)
Yellowcake, Margo Lanagan (Allen & Unwin)
After the Apocalypse, Maureen F. McHugh (Small Beer)
Somewhere Beneath Those Waves, Sarah Monette (Prime)
The Bible Repairman and Other Stories, Tim Powers (Tachyon)
Love and Romanpunk, Tansy Rayner Roberts (Twelfth Planet)
Welcome to Bordertown, Holly Black & Ellen Kushner, eds.
(Random House)
TRSF, Stephen Cass, ed. (Technology Review)
Ghosts by Gaslight, Jack Dann & Nick Gevers, eds.
(Harper Voyager US)
Blood and Other Cravings, Ellen Datlow, ed. (Tor)
Naked City, Ellen Datlow, ed. (St. Martin’s)
Teeth, Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, eds. (Harper)
A Book of Horrors, Stephen Jones, ed. (Jo Fletcher)
Steampunk!, Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant, eds. (Candlewick;
The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Three, Ellen Datlow, ed.
(Night Shade)
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-eighth Annual
Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed. (St. Martin’s Griffin)
The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2011, Paula Guran, ed.
(Prime)
Year’s Best SF 16, David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer, eds.
(Harper Voyager US)
The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011,
‘‘The Men from Porlock’’, Laird Barron (The Book of Cthulhu)
Gravity Dreams, Stephen Baxter (PS)
The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs, James P. Blaylock
(Subterranean)
‘‘The Adakian Eagle’’, Bradley Denton (Down These Strange
Streets)
‘‘Rampion’’, Alexandra Duncan (F&SF 5-6/11)
‘‘The Ice Owl’’, Carolyn Ives Gilman (F&SF 10-11/11)
‘‘Near Zennor’’, Elizabeth Hand (A Book of Horrors)
‘‘The Man Who Bridged the Mist’’, Kij Johnson
Collections, continued
Anthologies
ORIGINAL
REPRINT/BESTS
Novellas
Paradise Tales, Geoff Ryman (Small Beer)
Gothic High-Tech, Bruce Sterling (Subterranean)
Matilda Told Such Dreadful Lies: The Essential Lucy Sussex,
Lucy Sussex (Ticonderoga)
Novels & Stories 1963-1973, Kurt Vonnegut (Library of America)
Walker UK)
Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy 2, William Schafer, ed.
(Subterranean)
Life on Mars: Tales of the New Frontier,
Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Viking)
Engineering Infinity, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Solaris; Solaris UK)
Eclipse Four, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Night Shade)
The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities,
Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, eds. (Harper Voyager US)
Rich Horton, ed. (Prime)
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror: 22,
Stephen Jones, ed. (Running Press; Robinson)
Happily Ever After, John Klima, ed. (Night Shade)
The Book of Cthulhu, Ross E. Lockhart, ed. (Night Shade)
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year:
Volume Five, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Night Shade)
The Weird, Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, eds. (Corvus; Tor 2012)
In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination,
Non-Fiction
Denying Science, John Grant (Prometheus)
Margaret Atwood (Talese; Virago; Signal (Canada))
Nested Scrolls, Rudy Rucker (PS; Tor)
Becoming Ray Bradbury, Jonathan R. Eller
Musings and Meditations, Robert Silverberg (Nonstop)
(University of Illinois)
Sightings: Reviews 2002-2006, Gary K. Wolfe (Beccon)
Pardon This Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm,
Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature,
John Clute (Beccon)
Gary K. Wolfe (Wesleyan)
The Art of Sketch Theatre: Volume 1, Liliana Feliciano, ed.
(Baby Tattoo)
Out of This World: Science Fiction But Not As You Know It,
Mike Ashley, ed. (British Library)
Cor Blok, A Tolkien Tapestry: Pictures to Accompany The
Lord of the Rings (HarperCollins UK)
Spectrum 18: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art,
Cathy Fenner & Arnie Fenner (Underwood)
Flesk Prime, John Fleskes, ed. (Flesk)
Chris Foss, Hardware: The Definitive SF Works of Chris Foss
Art Books
(Titan)
Masters of Science Fiction and Fantasy Art, Karen Haber, ed.
(Rockport)
Jeffrey Jones, Jeffrey Jones: A Life in Art (IDW)
Mark Schultz, Mark Schultz: Various Drawings: Volume 5
(Flesk)
Exposé 9: Finest Digital Art in the Known Universe,
Daniel Wade, ed. (Ballistic)
Fantasy+ 3: Best Hand-painted Illustrations,
Vincent Zhao, ed. (CYPI/Gingko)
‘‘Kiss Me Twice’’, Mary Robinette Kowal (Asimov’s 6/11)
‘‘The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary’’, Ken Liu
(Panverse Three)
A Brood of Foxes, Kristin Livdahl (Aqueduct)
‘‘Dust to Dust’’, Tochi Onyebuchi (Panverse Three)
Blue and Gold, K.J. Parker (Subterranean)
‘‘The Ants of Flanders’’, Robert Reed (F&SF 7-8/11)
‘‘The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine’’, Peter Straub
(Conjunctions 56: Terra Incognita)
Silently and Very Fast, Catherynne M. Valente (WSFA)
(Asimov’s 10-11/11) �
LOCUS February 2012 / 43

� 2011 Recommended Reading List
Novelettes
‘‘The Silver Wind’’, Nina Allan (Interzone 3-4/11)
‘‘The Summer People’’, Kelly Link (Tin House: The Ecstatic/
‘‘Six Months, Three Days’’, Charlie Jane Anders (Tor.com 6/8/11) Steampunk!)
‘‘My Husband Steinn’’, Eleanor Arnason (Asimov’s 10-11/11) ‘‘The Cold Step Beyond’’, Ian R. MacLeod (Asimov’s 6/11)
‘‘Dying Young’’, Peter M. Ball (Eclipse Four)
‘‘The Choice’’, Paul McAuley (Asimov’s 2/11)
‘‘Blackwood’s Baby’’, Laird Barron (Ghosts by Gaslight)
‘‘The Boneless One’’, Alec Nevala-Lee (Analog 11/11)
‘‘Underbridge’’, Peter S. Beagle (Naked City)
‘‘The Book of Phoenix (Excerpted from The Great Book)’’,
‘‘The Last Ride of the Glory Girls’’, Libba Bray (Steampunk!) Nnedi Okorafor (Clarkesworld 3/11)
‘‘Queen of Atlantis’’, Sarah Rees Brennan
‘‘Hand to Mouth’’, Reggie Oliver
(Subterranean Summer ’11)
(Haunts: Reliquaries of the Dead)
‘‘Object Three’’, James L. Cambias (F&SF 11-12/11)
‘‘Mysteries of the Old Quarter’’, Paul Park (Ghosts by Gaslight)
‘‘Moth’s Tale’’, Isobelle Carmody
‘‘A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong’’, K.J. Parker
(Tales from the Tower: Volume One: The Wilful Eye)
(Subterranean Winter ’11)
‘‘Late Bloomer’’, Suzy McKee Charnas (Teeth)
‘‘Vampire Lake’’, Norman Partridge
‘‘The Copenhagen Interpretation’’, Paul Cornell (Asimov’s 7/11) (Subterranean: Dark Tales 2)
‘‘Bronsky’s Dates with Death’’, Peter David (F&SF 7-8/11) ‘‘A Response from EST17’’, Tom Purdom (Asimov’s 4-5/11)
‘‘The Iron Shirts’’, Michael F. Flynn (Tor.com 5/4/11)
‘‘Purple’’, Robert Reed (Asimov’s 3/11)
‘‘Digital Rites’’, Jim Hawkins (Interzone 11-12/11)
‘‘The Old Man and the Martian Sea’’, Alastair Reynolds
‘‘Steam Girl’’, Dylan Horrocks (Steampunk!)
(Life on Mars)
‘‘The Ki-Anna’’, Gwyneth Jones (Engineering Infinity)
‘‘What We Found’’, Geoff Ryman (F&SF 9-10/11)
‘‘The Vicar of Mars’’, Gwyneth Jones (Eclipse Four)
‘‘Laika’s Ghost’’, Karl Schroeder (Engineering Infinity)
‘‘Clean’’, John Kessel (Asimov’s 3/11)
‘‘Restoration’’, Robert Shearman
‘‘The Maltese Unicorn’’, Caitlín R. Kiernan (Supernatural Noir) (Everyone’s Just So So Special)
‘‘The Little Green God of Agony’’, Stephen King
‘‘The Dala Horse’’, Michael Swanwick (Tor.com 7/13/11)
(A Book of Horrors)
‘‘Fields of Gold’’, Rachel Swirsky (Eclipse Four)
‘‘A Long Walk Home’’, Jay Lake (Subterranean Winter ’11) ‘‘The Projected Girl’’, Lavie Tidhar (Naked City)
‘‘Catastrophic Disruption of the Head’’, Margo Lanagan
‘‘White Lines on a Green Field’’, Catherynne M. Valente
(Tales from the Tower: Volume One: The Wilful Eye)
‘‘Ghostweight’’, Yoon Ha Lee (Clarkesworld 1/11)
(Subterranean Fall ’11)
‘‘Attlee and the Long Walk’’, Kage Baker (Life on Mars)
‘‘Memories of Chalice’’, Peter M. Ball (Electric Velocipede Fall ’10)
‘‘The Birds and the Bees and the Gasoline Trees’’, John Barnes
(Engineering Infinity)
‘‘Martian Heart’’, John Barnes (Life on Mars)
‘‘Smoke City’’, Christopher Barzak (Asimov’s 4-5/11)
‘‘The Invasion of Venus’’, Stephen Baxter (Engineering Infinity)
‘‘The Way It Works Out and All’’, Peter S. Beagle (F&SF 7-8/11)
‘‘Dolly’’, Elizabeth Bear (Asimov’s 1/11)
‘‘Absinthe Fish’’, M. David Blake (Bull Spec Spring ’11)
‘‘∞’’, Darin Bradley (Electric Velocipede Fall ’10)
‘‘The Beancounter’s Cat’’, Damien Broderick (Eclipse Four)
‘‘Walls of Paper, Soft as Skin’’, Adam Calloway
(Beneath Ceaseless Skies 7/14/11)
‘‘East of Furious’’, Jonathan Carroll
(Conjunctions 56: Terra Incognita)
‘‘And Go Like This’’, John Crowley (Naked City)
‘‘The Brave Little Toaster’’, Cory Doctorow (TRSF)
‘‘The Shaddowwes Box’’, Terry Dowling (Ghosts by Gaslight)
‘‘Slow as a Bullet’’, Andy Duncan (Eclipse Four)
‘‘Breaking the Ice’’, Thoraiya Dyer (Cosmos 2-3/11)
‘‘Daddy Long Legs of the Evening’’, Jeffrey Ford (Naked City)
‘‘Younger Women’’, Karen Joy Fowler
(Subterranean Summer ’11)
‘‘Movement’’, Nancy Fulda (Asimov’s 3/11)
‘‘And Weep Like Alexander’’, Neil Gaiman
(Fables from the Fountain)
"The Case of Death and Honey", Neil Gaiman
(A Study in Sherlock)
‘‘Pug’’, Theodora Goss (Asimov’s 7/11)
‘‘Tidal Forces’’, Caitlín R. Kiernan (Eclipse Four)
‘‘Goodnight Moons’’, Ellen Klages (Life on Mars)
‘‘Mulberry Boys’’, Margo Lanagan (Blood and Other Cravings)
‘‘Canterbury Hollow’’, Chris Lawson (F&SF 1-2/11)
‘‘Durgen’s Party’’, Tim Lees (Black Static 4-5/11)
‘‘Valley of the Girls’’, Kelly Link (Subterranean Summer ’11)
‘‘Black Feathers’’, Alison J. Littlewood (Black Static 4-5/11)
‘‘The Paper Menagerie’’, Ken Liu (F&SF 3-4/11)
‘‘Tying Knots’’, Ken Liu (Clarkesworld 1/11)
44 / LOCUS February 2012
Short Stories
‘‘The Hanged Poet’’, Jeffrey Lyman
(Intergalactic Medicine Show 6/11)
‘‘The Surface of Last Scattering’’, Ken MacLeod (TRSF)
‘‘The Best Science Fiction of the Year Three’’, Ken MacLeod
(Solaris Rising)
‘‘Digging’’, Ian McDonald (Life on Mars)
‘‘Boumee and the Apes’’, Ian McHugh (Analog 5/11)
‘‘After the Apocalypse’’, Maureen F. McHugh
(After the Apocalypse)
‘‘A Soldier of the City’’, David Moles (Engineering Infinity)
‘‘All That Touches the Air’’, An Owomayela (Lightspeed 4/11)
‘‘Ragnarok’’, Paul Park (Tor.com 4/17/11)
‘‘The Server and the Dragon’’, Hannu Rajaniemi
(Engineering Infinity)
‘‘The Immortality Game’’, Cat Rambo (Fantasy 6/11)
‘‘Woman Leaves Room’’, Robert Reed (Lightspeed 3/11)
‘‘Ascension Day’’, Alastair Reynolds (Voices from the Past)
‘‘The Corpse Painter’s Masterpiece’’, M. Rickert (F&SF 9-10/11)
‘‘The Patrician’’, Tansy Rayner Roberts (Love and Romanpunk)
‘‘My Chivalric Fiasco’’, George Saunders (Harpers 9/11)
‘‘The Onset of a Paranormal Romance’’, Bruce Sterling
(Flurb Fall/Winter ’11)
‘‘For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I’’ll
Not Be Back Again’’, Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s 8/11)
‘‘Red Dawn: A Chow Mein Western’’, Lavie Tidhar
(Fantasy 11/11)
‘‘The Smell of Orange Groves’’, Lavie Tidhar (Clarkesworld 11/11)
‘‘The Bread We Eat in Dreams’’, Catherynne M. Valente
(Apex 11/11)
‘‘The Sandal-Bride’’, Genevieve Valentine (Fantasy 3/11)
‘‘Botanical Exercises for Curious Girls’’, Kali Wallace
(F&SF 3-4/11)
‘‘The Panda Coin’’, Jo Walton (Eclipse Four)
‘‘All You Can Do Is Breathe’’, Kaaron Warren
(Blood and Other Cravings)
‘‘Malak’’, Peter Watts (Engineering Infinity)
‘‘Final Girl Theory’’, A.C. Wise (ChiZine Spring/Summer ’11)
‘‘The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees’’,
E. Lily Yu (Clarkesworld 4/11)

� Rec’d Reading – Russell Letson
THE CIGaR BOx, UP-ENDED
by Russell Letson
Time once again to dump the contents of the reviewer’s
cigar box onto the table and see whether the
jumble that spills out reveals anything useful about
what our beloved genre has been up to over the last
12 months, or whether it’s just the usual collection
of stuff I enjoyed reading and managed to mumble
a few observations about. (I have my suspicions as
to which proposition the smart money is backing.)
There is a certain amount of personal history (actual,
not alternate) reflected in the pile on the table:
series and writers I follow, themes and motifs I’m
attracted to, subgenres I can’t resist. The downside
of all that accumulated, associated material is, the
Russell Letson (2008)
longer I review, the harder it is to get around to reading
emerging or unfamiliar writers. This year, though, I did find a couple of new
or at least new-to-me writers to add to the list of perennials. Ian R. MacLeod is
new-to-me only because my gaze has been elsewhere for the 14 years he has been
producing books, but the alternate-1930s-Hollywood-noir-private-eye world
of Wake Up and Dream made for a nice introduction. I
really ought to pay better attention in the future. I found
two promising newer (but not absolutely newbie) voices
in Gareth L. Powell and James S.A. Corey. Well, three if
you count the pseudonymously collaborative Corey’s two
sets of vocal cords. His/their Leviathan Wakes is another
variation on the science-fictional hard-boiled detective,
this time mixed with equal parts space-adventure and
invasive-alien-technology ingredients. As the first of a
series (with a preview of the next volume at the end),
it promises much cross-subgenre busy-ness to come.
Powell’s The Recollection may be even more variegated,
stirring together world-disrupting magical technologies,
travels through exotic landscapes, alien encounters, space
battles, and deep cosmic history in a way that has me
wondering what he will do for an encore.
Variations on that detective/cop/thriller option got exercised a good bit this
year. Jack McDevitt’s latest Alex Benedict novel, Firebird, operates in a defacto
mystery mode and even approximates the cozy – though only, I suspect,
in order to make clear the distinctly comfortless and dangerous nature of the
universe beyond the confines of Benedict’s pleasant home/office. Walter Jon
Williams’s very-near-future Deep State occupies a genre niche somewhere
between the techno-thriller and cyberpunk – a kind of implied space derived
from both of those traditions – though with much better writing than
most of the former and less Attitude than the latter. Charles Stross’s Rule
34 takes a slightly different set of almost-upon-us information and communication
technologies and runs as a police procedural. What’s strange
is that, as exotic as Stross’s bureaucratized and thoroughly computerized
and cross-connected Edinburgh police establishment
feels, some of the tech that enables
it has already gone live. Vice and violence,
of course, are evergreens, incapable of either
obsolescence or utter novelty.
I am struck by the tension in Stross’s
work between delight in the cornucopia of
creativity represented by technology and
the recognition of the horrors at large in the
universe or in mere human (or post-human)
nature. Scratch Monkey emphasizes both, with
technology functioning as an instrument of alldevouring
aggression (shades of Neal Asher – see
below). In fact, the sense of evil lurking just beneath
the surface of things – or breaking through and rampaging
around our little human settlements – seems
particularly strong this year. Or maybe I am just unconsciously following my
nose and sniffing out unease in the stack of books on the dresser. No cheery
or hopeful tales need apply.
Well, maybe not none. Kathleen Ann Goonan has produced her share of
exotic-adventure stories, but This Shared Dream pulls back from headlong
action in favor of complex considerations of the forces that generate the
violence and disorder that make adventures possible and necessary, and what
countermeasures might bring sanity and peace. Despite large, disruptive actions
in the back-story, threats of melodrama in the foreground, and historical and
even cosmic machineries rumbling away inside the walls, this is a reflective
and didactic novel of ideas, memory, and milieu. It makes large points rather
quietly, and it sneaks up on you.
If Kathy Goonan wants to avoid or even undo the catastrophic damage we
have visited upon ourselves, other writers tackle the recurring question, ‘‘What
happens if X?’’ when X is the kicking away of one or more of the props supporting
our civilization. John Barnes, Joe Haldeman, and Steven Gould all
apply this simple, powerful SF device and demonstrate that the post-apocalypse
novel is alive, well, and more interesting than The Road. Barnes’ Daybreak
Zero is perhaps the most comprehensive disaster scenario, since it eliminates
petroleum and electricity and all their derivative technologies and then adds
a psychopathic, nihilistic conspiracy/movement to the mix. Haldeman’s
Earthbound also subtracts electricity but spares us the nihilists, adding instead
capricious, godlike aliens. Either book will have you thinking about brushing
up on your survival skills and socking away camping
gear and edged weapons. Gould’s 7th Sigma is mild by
comparison: only one corner of the nation is reduced
to pre-modern technological levels, and tough, smart
pioneering types prove equal to the challenge of living
with swarms of deadly, self-replicating, metal-eating,
electricity-seeking robotic bugs. It didn’t even make
me want to hide in the basement.
A less global but still transformative natural disaster
sets up the world of Frederik Pohl’s all the Lives He
Led, but its rolling disorders feel more like projections
of this week’s headlines, all terrorism and fanaticism
and economic disturbance, with the resulting
struggles of impoverished, displaced populations.
Pohl’s trick is to show us these convulsions primarily
as background to the self-absorbed foolery of one of his familiar heelprotagonists.
The immortal, post-human boy narrator/protagonist of Cory
Doctorow’s The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow also absorbs almost as
much attention as the churned-up, future-shocked landscape though which
he moves, one step ahead of waves of radical, all-devouring tech. The stories
in Bruce Sterling’s Gothic High-Tech are not all about techno-historical
convulsions, but half of them are that way inclined, and they give the collection
its particular sense of spiraling (as distinct from linear) futurity:
we will recognize the past in our tomorrows, but they will still surprise us.
The accidents of publishing schedules, UPS deliveries, and my own
reading habits brought together one pair of books that proved to be most
interestingly matched: Neal Asher’s The Departure and Richard K. Morgan’s
The Cold Commands are hard-edged, violent adventures featuring mad, bad,
and very dangerous-to-know protagonists. The novels’ agendas, however, are
somewhat different, since Morgan’s includes a critique of pseudo-medievalfantasy
fantasies, while Asher’s seems more of a revenge adventure featuring
an enormously enhanced Dirty-Harryish protagonist raging against a corrupt
and callous political machine that hasn’t really bothered to address the planet’s
interconnected and continuing disasters.
While Allen Steele’s work does not really occupy a cozy corner
of SF, it’s a relief, after such disquieting stuff, to face up to such
relatively mild threats as the murderer and giant alien sea-critters
of his angel of Europa, or even the familiar dangers of space
exploration in Hex, in which some folk from the ever-expanding
Coyote cycle cope with inscrutable aliens and a seriously Big but
not at all Dumb Object. And speaking of commodious (not to
say vast) settings and long running-series, it took Vernor Vinge
nearly two decades to drop a second shoe in The Children of the
Sky, which focuses less on the titanic forces and cosmic issues
of its predecessor, a Fire Upon the Deep, than on intra- and
inter-species intrigues, palace revolts, planetary-romance-style
treks, and what might be called Nth-contact revelations about
alien psychology and culture(s). (More multi-subgenre tossed
salad there.) Matthew Hughes’ The Other is, by comparison, a
chamber-music version of the encounter with anthropological oddity: he finds
humankind sufficiently weird, crazed, and variable to occupy his attention
(though alien influences lurk interestingly in the shadows).
So at the end of the cigar-box sort, maybe there were a few common threads
to point out after all, but I still suspect that it’s all in my head – and now it’s in
yours. The severely-limited, I-would-really-prefer-not-to-leave-anything-out
Very Recommended Subset list follows:
Daybreak Zero, John Barnes
This Shared Dream, Kathleen Ann Goonan
7th Sigma, Steven Gould
Earthbound, Joe Haldeman
Rule 34, Charles Stross
Scratch Monkey, Charles Stross
The Children of the Sky, Vernor Vinge
Deep State, Walter Jon Williams
– Russell Letson
�
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� Rec’d Reading – Graham Sleight
YEaR IN REVIEW
by Graham Sleight
I’ve now been writing
these summations
for five years, and I’m
struck by the longerterm
trends in the speculative
fiction field.
For a start, there’s the
sense that the genres
of the fantastic are
cross-pollinating more
and more. The career
of someone like Kelly
Link now seems much
Graham Sleight (2010)
more typical, and less
like an outlier. Secondly, there’s the growth of
independent publishers like Tachyon and Night
Shade, who’ve taken up many of the midlist books
that bigger organisations with larger overheads
can’t afford to take on. Thirdly, despite magazine
sales continuing to be low by the
standards of past decades, short
fiction is probably the most vibrant
area of speculative fiction
But that’s not to say that all
the old certainties are gone:
there are such things as science
fiction novels, and some of them
are pretty good. Kathleen Ann
Goonan seems, after In War
Time, to have found new ways
of using her fiction to talk about
history. This Shared Dream is
a steely alternate-world story
but also a family history and an
argument about the choices that the USA has made.
God’s War by Kameron Hurley and its successor
Infidel may prompt some questions about their
worldbuilding, but Hurley has certainly created
one of the most intensely
felt, kinetic futures I’ve
seen in a long while. China
Miéville’s Embassytown
was a book that had been
rumoured for some years:
a full-blown space opera
wrestling with some
of the same concerns as
Miéville’s Bas-Lag books.
Dense and chewy, it engaged
with questions of
language and otherness in
a way that reminded me
of Samuel R. Delany’s
Babel-17. Its pleasures may not have been as immediate
as some of the author’s other books, but it left
plenty of things to think about. The same can be said
of Christopher Priest’s The Islanders. This was a
return to familiar territory (the Dream Archipelago)
and approaches (unreliable
narration), but its immense
skill was beyond question.
Adam Roberts’ By
Light alone was full, as
Roberts’ fiction always is,
of ideas and critiques of
past SF, but it was also a
very thorough argument
about the costs of living
in enclaves, and what it’s
like to be cast out of them.
Charles Stross’s Rule 34
allowed the author, not for
the first time, to have fun
being devil’s advocate, shocking people with the
46 / LOCUS February 2012
new, but, like its predecessor Halting State, you felt
that the subject-matter gave the author something
to get his teeth into. Vernor Vinge’s The Children
of the Sky was a direct sequel to a Fire Upon the
Deep, but felt very different from its predecessor.
By concentrating on the fate of the children from
the earlier book on the world of the alien Tines, it
almost had an archaic flavour, like the science fiction
one remembered reading years
ago. Robert Charles Wilson’s Vortex
followed on from Spin and axis,
but was a thoroughly modern book:
Wilson can do both characterisation
and outrageous conceptual leaps,
and both were on show here. Finally,
Gene Wolfe’s Home Fires was a very
conspicuous return to form. Two old
Wolfe themes returned here. Firstly,
what is the real cost of having to fight
to preserve your society and culture?
Secondly, how do identity and selfhood
get created? In Wolfe, there’s
nothing more difficult than becoming a whole
person who does the right things.
Among fantasy novels, The Night Circus by
Erin Morgenstern was a triumph of atmosphere.
There were plenty of visible
influences, from Ray Bradbury to the
current New York theatre hit Sleep No
More. And even if the story wasn’t as
memorable as the venue, it was a book
that stayed in the mind. Lisa Goldstein’s
The Uncertain Places was, like the
Priest, an extremely welcome return.
It dealt with some familiar Goldstein
themes: California, times of political
turmoil, and twice-told tales. Goldstein
has a peculiar gift for directness in describing
complicated changes, which was
fully on show here. Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife
was a book that almost had too much in it, as it tried
to embody the recent past of the Yugoslav cultures.
Folktales and history mingled, to stunning effect. Jo
Walton’s among Others
wasn’t a perfect book – I
found myself questioning
the narrative voice really
being that of a teenager –
but I can’t think of a work
since Damon Knight’s The
Futurians that’s so neatly
captured the experience of
finding yourself in science
fiction: finding that this
was the community that
you belonged to. The blurb
said it might be a break-out
book; I thought it was a
break-in book.
I found myself reading a lot of collections this
year. The Monkey’s Wedding and Other Stories
wasn’t top-drawer Joan Aiken, but any new collection
of her work is welcome. The Collected Stories
of Carol Emshwiller: Volume 1 was the first installment
of what promises
to be an enormously important
project: Emshwiller’s
work seems more modern
by the day, and many of
the stories in this book
would otherwise be difficult
to find. Unpossible and
Other Stories by Daryl
Gregory was a career-todate
retrospective, and very
welcome too. Stories like
‘‘Second Person, Present
Tense’’ feel like they have
become canonical in a
very short space of time,
and Gregory’s persistent
inventiveness is a rebuke to
those who feel that SFnal
speculation is now played
out. Maureen McHugh’s
after the apocalypse
was, in part, a
punishingly realistic
view of
many of SF’s
fondly imagined
scenarios for the
fall of civilisation. There are no free rides
here, just a pained humanism, and, by
implication, a reverence for the civilisation
(however flawed) that we have. Geoff
Ryman’s Paradise Tales was also pretty
punishing on occasions, and readers of
Ryman’s other fiction will be familiar
with his often harsh verdicts on the costs
on others of life in the richer part of the world.
But Ryman is also capable of great optimism (as
in ‘‘Everywhere’’), and readers who haven’t been
following his work in detail will be
surprised by the variety of work on
show here.
I didn’t read as much non-fiction
this year as in previous years, but
Out of This World: Science Fiction
but not as you know it was Mike
Ashley’s catalogue/exposition of
this year’s British Library SF exhibition,
and was written – as you’d
expect – with exemplary clarity and
good sense. Margaret Atwood’s In
Other Worlds: SF and the Human
Imagination was, no doubt, meant
to stir up a number of debates; and it did. Finally,
I’d single out Gary Wolfe’s Evaporating Genres.
I may be biased because
Gary’s a friend and I agree
with him on much of what
he says, but his central thesis
seems more and more
relevant. It’s not just – as
I suggested earlier – that
the genres we’ve known
up till now are beginning to
merge into each other. It’s
that we need a vocabulary
that we haven’t had before
to try to describe what’s
going on; Wolfe’s book is
as good a starting-point as
one could want.
a Dozen Books of the Year
The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller:
Volume 1, Carol Emshwiller (Nonstop)
The Uncertain Places, Lisa Goldstein (Tachyon)
This Shared Dream,
Kathleen Ann Goonan (Tor)
Unpossible and Other Stories,
Daryl Gregory (Fairwood)
after the apocalypse,
Maureen McHugh (Small Beer)
Embassytown, China Miéville (Del Rey)
The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern
(Doubleday)
The Tiger’s Wife, Téa Obreht (Random House)
The Islanders, Christopher Priest (Gollancz)
Paradise Tales, Geoff Ryman (Small Beer)
among Others, Jo Walton (Tor)
Home Fires, Gene Wolfe (Tor)
–Graham Sleight

BEST OF 2011
by Paul Witcover
The following is a by-no-means exhaustive list
of my favorite books of 2011. I reviewed some but
not all of them in these pages. They include both
fantasy and science fiction titles, among which are
two first novels as well as, in one case, the final
novel in a positively brobdignagian series. Buckle
your seat belts; here goes, in no particular order:
Howard Jones’s The Desert of Souls is a smart
and loving homage to pulp master Harold Lamb as
well as being an unusually accomplished first novel
in its own right. The jacket copy calls the book ‘‘a
thrilling, inventive cross between One Thousand
and One Nights and Sherlock Holmes,’’ and though
Paul Witcover (2011)
jacket copy is almost always rank hyperbole, in this
case you can believe the hype. I would add Robert E. Howard, Edgar Allen Poe,
and Fritz Lieber to the mix. Jones, editor of Black Gate magazine, is a Lamb
scholar who has painstakingly shepherded the works of Lamb back into to print,
and his own writing reflects the best historical and humanistic qualities of his
literary master . . . with the addition of fantastic elements that fall squarely
within the pulp tradition while, at the same time, reflecting a
more contemporary appreciation of those tropes. Jones gives the
tired landscape of sword and sorcery a modern makeover whose
relevance to our own terror-infected times, while not overt or
didactic, is inescapable. His two heroes – a scholar, Dabir ibn
Khalil, and a soldier, Asim el Abbas – follow ably in the fictional
footsteps of such derring-duos as Holmes and Watson, Fafhrd
and the Grey Mouser, and Aubrey and Maturin.
The Traitor’s Daughter, by Paula Brandon, is a deceptively
ambitious fantasy cloaked in the guise of a traditional romance.
The romance is there, but for the most part it is trumped by sudden,
stark intrusions of violence or an arch, ironic tone reminiscent
– and not at all unworthy – of vintage Jack Vance. Add a
gothic plot that borrows choice bits from Cymbeline and, last
but not least, features the walking dead, and you’ve got a fun, frothy, bracingly
blood-splashed romantic fantasy that approaches both fantasy and romance
with deep skepticism, if not outright contempt, for the easy consolations both so
often afford. Paula Brandon is the nom de plume of writer Paula Volsky. I have
nothing against pen names, but I do have something against the pretense that
a novel by a respected pro like Volsky is really the debut of a first-time writer.
There is something fundamentally dishonest about pushing a writer who has no
trouble getting published and reviewed under her own name as a first-time author,
whether you come right out and make the claim or allow others to strongly
imply it on your behalf. It is hard enough for talented new writers to break into
the publishing world: do we have to make it still harder, by taking a slot ‘‘reserved’’
for a new writer and assigning it to an established writer deemed by her
publisher, in this case Bantam Books, to be in need of rebranding? Yes, Volsky’s
name is on the copyright page, but must readers now, like the clients of pettifogging
lawyers, check the small print of every book?
I continue to be a big fan of Robert V.S. Redick’s
Chathrand Voyage series, an inventive fantasy set
mostly at sea aboard a magical ship the size of a small
city. The latest installment, The River of Shadows, is
this talented young author’s best yet. In many ways,
Redick’s story is paint-by-numbers fantasy, yet some
contrary chaotic spirit in him balks at conventional
trappings and continually wrests his story into weird
and unexpected waters.
Redick is unusually gifted when it comes
to characterization. He paints broadly, often
gleefully embracing caricature; his characters
may not be strictly lifelike, but they are brimming
over with life: Pazel Pathkendle, an impulsive tarboy afflicted
with a debilitating, magically fueled linguistic facility; Thasha Isiq,
the proud daughter of an admiral, who carries a magical burden of
her own; Captain Nilius Rose, a ghost-haunted madman, sadist, and
seafaring genius; Felthrup Stargraven, a rat mysteriously awakened to
sentience – the list of memorable characters goes on and on.
Just as Redick’s characters are bigger than the roles reserved for them
in his plot, so, too, are the speculative implications of his world-building
grander than the rickety genre framework underlying them. It’s a fascinating,
stimulating, at times frustrating process – but out of it has come one of the
most distinctive and appealing epic fantasies of the last decade.
The prolific Catherynne M. Valente makes my list with Deathless, an extraordinary
mash-up of Russian mythology and history – specifically, the Russian
Revolution and the Siege of Leningrad. Here she retells and updates the myth of
Koschei the Deathless, an evil wizard who abducts young women, bringing in a
whole panoply of divine figures, from the familiar – Baba
Yaga – to the more obscure. Her heroine, Marya Morevna,
is passionate, brave, dreamy . . . just the sort to be swept
up in a fairy tale. But of course the events in store for her,
not only in the deathless dream kingdom of Koschei but
in the all-too-real environs of a Leningrad assaulted by
artillery shells and hunger, are anything but a fairy tale. By
bringing raw history and myth together in violent poetic
collision, Valente illuminates both.
If only Neal Stephenson’s Reamde were science fiction,
I would have included it here with pleasure, but since it’s
not, let me praise instead Walter Jon Williams’s prescient
and un-put-downable cyberthriller, Deep State. Williams
gets that we are living in a science fictional world; it’s not
(just) a matter of cool gadgetry but of seeing the present day, as it were, from the
perspective of a future that is nearer than most people outside our field are prepared
to grasp. Stephenson flirts with that perspective in Reamde, but his concerns lie
elsewhere. Williams gets it exactly right. And his novel is as compulsively readable
as anything he has ever written, beautifully executed cloak-and-dagger stuff as his
heroine, Dagmar Shaw, a former science fiction writer and alternate reality game
(ARG) designer (interesting that Reamde, too, should feature a strong gaming
aspect!), goes up against a corrupt Turkish regime using her mad skillz
as a designer along with plenty of the cool gadgetry mentioned above.
What can I say of George R. R. Martin’s a Dance with Dragons
except that it was very much worth the wait? Here Martin is back on
top of his game, after what I felt to be a subpar performance in a Feast
for Crows. Major characters like Tyrion, Jon, Brandon, and Daenerys,
who were largely or altogether absent from a Feast of Crows, are
back as viewpoint characters, though some central storylines from that
book – notably those involving Samwell Tarly, Brienne, Catelyn, aka
Lady Stoneheart, and Sansa and Littlefinger – are missing, and characters
like Jaime, Arya, and even, at least for most of the book, Cersei,
are present but more peripheral than readers might have expected or
hoped. Still, while there are no sequences in
this novel that compare to Martin’s two most
brilliant stretches of sustained writing so far, the incredible
set-piece Battle of the Blackwater and the almost
unbearably tragic Red Wedding, there are several
scenes that readers are not likely to soon forget. I love
the opening credits of the HBO series, not just for their
striking effects but because their depiction of Martin’s
world as a vast and intricate machine is fully borne out
in the scope and precision of his plot, whose wheels
and gears mesh beautifully but without mercy as they
advance toward a climax and conclusion, still far off
yet close enough now to be present there between the
lines, like the first distant glimmerings of spring discernible
even in the depths of winter.
For sheer crazed brilliance and bravura writing, it was hard to top Kris
Saknussemm’s Enigmatic Pilot, the sequel (sort of) to Zanesville. Enigmatic
Pilot is more self-assured than its outrageous predecessor. It is more measured in
its wonders, more controlled in its excesses. The hyperbolic satire is still here, but
it is tempered by a strain of deeply sympathetic humanism. If the narrative voice
of Zanesville was that of a crazed carnival barker, here Saknussemm channels
the eminently trustworthy tones of a Shelby Foote, a roguish, avuncular historian
with a dry wit, a trickster’s twinkle in his eye, a capacious knowledge of American
history, and a love of tall tales. The novel opens in 1844, and traces the life of
Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd, ‘‘one of the neglected geniuses of history,’’ from the age
of 5 to that of 7. Along the way, young Lloyd will stumble into the
midst of an ancient conflict between rival secret societies possessed
of technologies indistinguishable from magic, lose his virginity
and, later, his heart, and plumb the depths of the secret history of
America – the country’s shadow side: the American nightmare, if
you will. A brave, heartfelt, wild, and wise book.
Hard to top Saknussemm, perhaps, but Rudy Rucker came close
in his delightful riff on Orpheus and Eurydice, Jim and the Flims.
Hilarious, profound, visionary, and genuinely moving, it vaults to
the top spot on my list of favorite Rudy Rucker novels. A mere recapitulation
of plot and characters cannot do justice to the inspired
language and bizarre flights of fancy that characterize this powerful
hit of literary LSD, which reminded me at times of Philip K. Dick,
Carlos Casteneda, and William Blake, but in the end is sui generis.
If you’re already familiar with Rucker’s work, which is based rigorously in science,
mathematics, and philosophy but takes off in hallucinatory directions that
retain some kind of human connection via his lovable everyman-and-woman
characters, then you don’t need any urging from me to pick up this book. But if
you haven’t read anything by Rucker, give this a try. You’ll be walking around
�
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� Rec’d Reading – Paul Witcover
afterward with a dazed smile on your face, I guarantee it.
Steven Erikson closes out my list with The Crippled God, the tenth and final
book of his vast epic fantasy series, The Malazan Book of the Fallen. Erikson’s
books are rich with virtues and with flaws. He seems to have no internal editor,
and there is certainly no evidence of an external one. Consequently, genius
wrestles with self-indulgence in his pages, and all too often, especially as
the series has progressed, it’s self-indulgence that has won out. Yet... there is
indisputably genius here. At his best, Erikson is a gripping storyteller with an
extraordinarily wide range and an unusually original imagination. His magic
YEaR IN REVIEW
by adrienne Martini
As is usual, this
end-of-year round up
reminds me of how
much I meant to read
but utterly failed to get
to. What I need, really,
is some sort of nonpainful,
non-chronic
condition that requires
hours upon hours of
bedrest and comes with
a maid and butler.
Speaking of fanta-
Adrienne Martini (2009) sies, this has been a
good year for them. Most notable, perhaps, was Lev
Grossman’s The Magician King, which
was a continuation and internal expansion
of the story started in The Magicians.
While I admired the first book for its skill
and vision, there was an overall chilliness
to the tone that made it hard to really sink
in to. With King, Grossman found a sense
of openness that made the story immersive
and addictive. Grossman picked up the
well-earned not-a-Hugo John W. Campbell
award tiara for his work over the past few
years – and I can’t wait for the (tentatively
titled) Magician’s Land to hit the shelves
in a year to be announced.
Two other book-length fantasies that
are still in my increasingly sieve-like mind are Jo
Walton’s among Others and Libba Bray’s Beauty
Queens. While both are portraits of a world very
BOOKS FOR 2011
by Carolyn Cushman
2011 wasn’t a stellar year for
me – I didn’t read most of the
year’s big books: I snagged Patrick
Rothfuss’s The Wise Man’s Fear
and Terry Pratchett’s Snuff, both
entertaining as expected, but for
the most part spent my time with
the usual urban fantasy, paranormal
romance, and YA. A lot of ongoing
series on my must-read list saw
new installments, but I also found
some new series to keep an eye on:
Barbara Ashford’s Spellcast is a charming sum-
Carolyn Cushman (2010)
mer stock fantasy, with at least one more volume
to come. Kevin Hearne’s amusing Iron Druid series debuted with Hounded,
Hexed, and Hammered, about the last of the Druids living in the present day
American Southwest, a rather cocky fellow who gets maneuvered into taking
on a variety of gods from various belief systems. Stacey Jay’s new adult urban
fantasy Dead on the Delta introduced a down-home post-apocalyptic Louisiana
beset by some really nasty fairies, and a troubled protagonist who’s one of the
few immune to the fairies’ poison. Celia Jerome’s Willow Tate series mixes
contemporary fantasy with elements of small town mystery; I missed the first
volume in 2010, but caught up with this entertaining series with volumes two
and three, Night Mares in the Hamptons and Fire Works in the Hamptons.
Only a couple of this year’s first novels really stood out for me. Jo Anderton’s
Debris, a very atmospheric tale of a woman brought down from a position of
status who comes to realize there is something very wrong with her society
48 / LOCUS February 2012
much like the one we currently inhabit,
the two are more different than they are
alike. Walton’s book is quiet and subtle
where Bray’s is raucous and blunt. Both
are gorgeous.
Any year that provides a new Maureen
F. McHugh collection is a good one. Her
after the apocalypse was named one of
Publishers Weekly’s Top Ten books of 2011
and contains such lush stories as ‘‘Useless
Things’’ and ‘‘The Effect of Centrifugal
Forces’’ that promise to stay with you well
after the new year has dawned. Her work
here feels almost curated, as if she were
preparing an exhibit about human failings for the
intelligent beings who will replace us. Somehow,
McHugh never fails to capture ineffable emotions
with seeming ease.
Two new writers leapt from
the background this year: Erin
Morgenstern and Rob Ziegler.
Morgenstern’s gentle The Night
Circus may not be a perfect light
fantasy but it comes awfully close.
Her dueling magicians and their
resulting Le Cirque des Rêves
have more substance and power
than they feel like they should,
given Morgenstern’s light hand. The
same can be said of Ziegler, despite
how meaty his apocalyptic Seed
is. Zeigler’s story of a powerful
agricultural conglomerate controlling a desperate
world remains lightly told, no matter how dark the
material grows.
system, and its attendant back story, ceaselessly elaborated in each succeeding
book of the series, is absolutely sui generis. The Crippled God is not Erikson
at his best, it must be said, but it’s a distinct improvement over the previous
volumes, and its long and elaborately choreographed climax – a battle spanning
hundreds of pages – is something of a tour de force. Flawed though it may
be, The Malazan Book of the Fallen merits a high place in the annals of epic
fantasy, and while The Crippled God does not elevate that position higher
than it is already, neither does it drag it down. Thus, my inclusion of Erikson
here is more in recognition of the accomplishment of the whole than of this
particular part thereof.
–Paul Witcover
Not every book is memorable for
its heavy emotional weight, mind. At
least two reliable writers produced
new works that deliver everything
that we already liked about them.
Cherie Priest’s Hellbent might not
set the world on fire with cutting
edge genius; it is, however, a lovely
story about a vampire well told.
John Scalzi’s Fuzzy Nation reenvisions
the H. Beam Piper classic
for a new audience with panache
and ease. Does either push anything
resembling an envelope? Nope. Not
everything needs to in order to be worth the time
spent reading it.
Tansy Rayner Roberts’ Love and Romanpunk
defies categorization. Still, it belongs on any 2011
round-up. Call Love and Romanpunk a series of
linked short stories that swoop through a variety
of beloved subgenres while telling an engaging
emotional tale. Yes, each story could stand alone –
‘‘The Patrician’’ is my favorite – but together the
tales are more than the sum of their parts.
Hopefully I’ll get to the giant stack of books
that lives next to my bed, which includes Delia
Sherman’s The Freedom Maze, Holly Black
& Ellen Kushner’s Welcome to Bordertown,
and Catherynne M. Valente’s The Girl Who
Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her
Own Making, before next year. Now to research
that acute and vaguely debilitating illness to help
me in my quest.
– Adrienne Martini
and its technology/magic. Rae Carson’s The Girl of Fire and Thorns
(UK as Fire and Thorns) is a strong YA fantasy about a princess who
is supposedly her people’s chosen one – but has no idea what she’s
been chosen to do.
Notable YA titles include Kelly Barnhill’s The Mostly True Story
of Jack, a twisty and intriguingly different contemporary faerie tale
about a boy who finally finds where he belongs. Rachel Neumeier’s
The Floating Islands is a strong adventure story about an orphaned
boy who only wants to fly, but finds himself caught in a war between his
old and new homelands. Tamora Pierce had a couple of strong books,
the collection Tortall and Other Lands and the third book in the
Beka Cooper/Provost’s Dog trilogy, Mastiff.
Catherine Gilbert Murdock’s Wisdom’s Kiss
is a charming sort-of-epistolary sequel to
Princess Ben that requires a bit of reading between
the lines as various characters tell their version of
the story. Sarah Beth Durst’s Drink, Slay, Love is a
very goofy anti-Twilight sort of tale about a vampire
teen who gets a conscience after being gored by a
unicorn. David Weber’s a Beautiful Friendship is
a good YA SF tale, but the first half – the best part
– is a reprint, the story of how humans and treecats
discovered each other. Patricia C. Wrede, across the
Great Barrier is an excellent second volume in the
Frontier Magic series about an alternate American in
the 1800s. Brenna Yovanoff’s The Space Between is
a darkly wondrous tale of a daughter of Lilith and Lucifer, trying to find her
brother – and maybe herself.
– Carolyn Cushman

2011 SHORT FICTION
by Gardner Dozois
2011 was a bit of a lackluster year for short fiction
overall, although, as usual, there’s so much of
it is published now in so many different formats,
the usual print magazines and anthologies as well
as online-only venues and downloadable and/or
small-press chapbooks, that it was still easy to find
enough good stuff to fill a 350,000-word anthology,
with stories left over that I’d like to have used
but didn’t have room for.
The three best SF anthologies
of the year were
all edited by Jonathan
Strahan: Engineering
Gardner Dozois (2011)
Infinty, Life On Mars,
and Eclipse Four. Engineering Infinity (my selection
for the year’s single best SF anthology) contained excellent
stories by David Moles, Gwyneth Jones, Karl
Schroeder, and Stephen Baxter, as well as good work
by Hannu Rajaniemi, Peter Watts, John Barnes, and
others. The YA anthology Life On Mars contained
first-rate stuff by Ian McDonald, John Barnes, and
Kage Baker, as well as good work by Nancy Kress,
Alastair Reynolds, Stephen Baxter, Ellen Klages, and
others. Eclipse Four, which, unlike the first two books mentioned here, features
fantasy and slipstream as well as SF, had excellent work of various sorts
by Andy Duncan, Damien Broderick, Gwyneth Jones, and Peter M. Ball, as
well as good work by Caitlín R. Kiernan, Jo Walton, James Patrick Kelly, Kij
Johnson, Rachel Swirsky, and others. All of this would be sufficient to make
Strahan a good candidate for the 2011 Best Editor Hugo Short Form, in my
opinion – although as an anthology editor, whose anthologies may not have
been seen by a large-enough proportion of the voting demographic, that may
not be likely.
On the other hand, Asimov’s Science Fiction had a very strong year as well,
perhaps strong enough to earn Sheila Williams her second Hugo in a row.
Excellent fiction by Paul McAuley, Kij Johnson, Michael Swanwick, Elizabeth
Bear, Tom Purdom, Ian R. MacLeod, and Paul Cornell appeared in Asimov’s
this year, as well as much good work by Robert Reed, John Kessel, Mary
Robinette Kowal, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Theodora Goss, Allen M. Steele,
Nancy Kress, Nancy Fulda, and others; there was a high proportion of SF in
the magazine this year, with only some fantasy, most of which was weaker
than the SF.
F&SF also had a strong year, publishing more SF than they usually do (although
they also published a lot of fantasy, most of it better than the fantasy
in Asimov’s); excellent stories by Robert Reed, Geoff Ryman, Carolyn Ives
Gilman, Chris Lawson, and Peter S. Beagle appeared, as well as good stuff by
James Cambias, Robert Chilson, Karl Bunker, David Marcus,
Albert E. Cowdrey, Kali Wallace, Ken Liu, Rick Norwood, and
others. The online magazine Clarkesworld also had a first-rate
year, publishing strong stories by Yoon Ha Lee, Lavie Tidhar,
Ken Liu, David Klecha, and Tobias S. Bucknell, Cat Rambo,
Jason Chapman, Nnedi Okorafor, Gord Sellar, and others. The
online magazine Subterranean perhaps didn’t have quite as
strong a year as they did last year, but still published good stuff,
SF and fantasy both, by Jay Lake, K.J. Parker, Catherynne M.
Valente, Robert Silverberg, Daniel Abraham, Mike Resnick,
Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and others.
Analog had a somewhat weak year overall, although it still
published strong stories by Alec Nevala-Lee, Sean McMullen,
Juliette Wade, Kristine Kathyrn Rusch, Don D’Amassa, Marissa
Lingen, and others. Similarly, Interzone had a weak year, but
still published good stories by Jim Hawkins, Lavie Tidhar, Mecurio D. Rivera,
Jason Sanford, and others. Tor.com published too many promotional slices of
upcoming novels, but also published some good fiction by Michael Swanwick,
Michael F. Flynn, Harry Turtledove, Catherynne M. Valente, Charlie Jane
Anders, and others. The online magazine Lightspeed was weaker in its sophomore
year than it had been in its freshman year, although it still published worthwhile
stuff by Robert Reed, David Farland, Vyler Kaftan, An Owomoyele, and
Genevieve Valentine. The online magazine Fantasy, on the other hand, recently
taken over by Lightspeed editor John Joseph Adams, had a strong year, publishing
good fiction by Lavie Tidhar, James Alan Gardner, Sarah Monette, Cat
Rambo, Tim Pratt, Kit Howard, Jeremiah Tolbert, Genevieve Valentine, and
others. I’d still like to see the online Strange Horizons publish more SF and
less fantasy/slipstream, but they did run good stuff by Lewis Shiner, Gavin J.
Grant, Nisi Shawl, Genevieve Valentine, Charlie Jane Anders, Tracey Canfield,
and others. The print magazine Realms of Fantasy, in what will theoretically
be its last full year (see below), ran noteworthy fiction by Richard Parks,
Lisa Goldstein, Thea Hutcheson, Alan Smale, and others. Electric Velocipede
had interestingly eclectic pieces from Peter M. Ball, Karl Bunker, Genevieve
Valentine, William Shunn, and others. The online sword & sorcery magazine
Beneath Ceaseless Skies had worthwhile fiction by Marie Brennan, Richard
Parks, Geoffrey Maloney, Siobhan Carroll, and others. Sword & sorcery print
magazine Black Gate had strong work by Chris Willrich, Emily Mah, and others.
Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Abyss & Apex, On Spec,
and Apex Magazine were all somewhat weak this year, although OSCIMS had
interesting stuff from Aliette de Bodard, Stephen Kotowych, Naomi Kritzer,
Jeffrey Lyman, and Tony Pi, and Apex Magazine had good stuff by Elizabeth
Bear, Genevieve Valentine, Kat Howard, and others, while Abyss & Apex featured
strong work by Howard V. Hendrix, Cat Rambo, C.W. Johnson, and others.
Although not as strong as the anthologies edited by Jonathan Strahan, the reborn
version of the old Solaris anthology series, now called Solaris Rising and
edited by new editor Ian Whates, turned in a solid debut performance, consisting
of almost all center-core SF, and featuring good work by Dave Hutchinson,
Ian McDonald, Ken MacLeod, Alastair Reynolds, Stephen Palmer, Keith
Brooke & Eric Brown, and others. Ian Whates also brought out two more minor
but enjoyable original anthologies, Further Conflicts and Fables from
the Fountain. Print magazine MIT Technology Review published a special allfiction
issue, TRSF, supposedly the start of an annual series, which featured
intelligent core SF by Pat Cadigan, Ken MacLeod, Gwyneth Jones, Elizabeth
Bear, Vandana Singh, Cory Doctorow, Paul Di Filippo, and others. Postscripts
24/25 featured mostly slipstream, fantasy, and soft horror, too much of it for my
taste, but did also include strong SF stories by Ken MacLeod, Keith Brooke,
and Adam Roberts. Panverse Three, an all-novella anthology edited by Dario
Ciriello, featured strong novellas by Ken Liu and Don D’Ammasa. Welcome
to the Greenhouse, edited by Gordon Van Gelder,
was somewhat disappointing overall, although it had
interesting work by Chris Lawson, Bruce Sterling,
Gregory Benford, Brian W. Aldiss, and others. alien
Conflicts, edited by Marty Halpern, was a strong
reprint SF anthology about alien contact, and Brave
New Worlds, edited by John Joseph Adams, was a
good reprint collection of dystopian SF.
The strongest novella chapbook of the year,
by a good margin, was Silently and Very Fast by
Catherynne M. Valente, but there were other good
novella chapbooks as well, such as Jesus and the
Eightfold Path by Lavie Tidhar, angel of Europa by
Allen M. Steele, Gravity Dreams by Stephen Baxter,
Yellow Cabochon by Matthew Hughes, The White
City by Elizabeth Bear, The affair of the Chalk Cliffs by James P. Blaylock,
and Starship Winter by Eric Brown.
There were a number of anthologies exploring the confusing and sometimes
contradictory area now known as ‘‘urban fantasy,’’ including Naked City:
Tales of Urban Fantasy, edited by Ellen Datlow; The Urban Fantasy
anthology, a reprint anthology edited by Peter S. Beagle and Joe R.
Lansdale; Supernatural Noir, edited by Ellen Datlow, Down These
Strange Steets, edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois;
Ghosts by Gaslight, edited by Jack Dann and Nick Gevers; Crucified
Dreams, edited by Joe R. Lansdale; and Home Improvement:
Undead Edition, edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L.P. Kelner.
Although there were several last year, there seems to be only one
prominent original fantasy anthology this year, Subterranean: Tales
of Dark Fantasy, edited by Bill Schafer (although I suppose an argument
could be made for putting it in with the urban fantasy anthologies).
I don’t follow this area closely, but prominent horror anthologies
seemed to include Teeth: Vampire Tales, edited by Ellen Datlow and
Terry Windling; Blood and Other Cravings, edited by Ellen Datlow;
Vampires: The Recent Dead, edited by
Paula Guran; two zombie anthologies, Zombies!,
Zombies!, Zombies!, edited by Otto Penzler; and
Zombiesque, edited by Stephen L. Antczak, James
C. Basser, and Martin H. Greenberg; a mixed reprint/original
shapeshifter anthology, Bewere the
Night, edited by Ekaterina Sedia; two Lovecraftian
anthologies, New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird,
edited by Paula Guran and The Book of Cthulhu,
edited by Ross E. Lockhart; and two massive reprint
anthologies, The Century’s Best Horror Fiction,
Volume One and Two, edited by John Pelan. There
were two steampunk anthologies, Steampunk!:
an anthology Fantastically Rich and Strange
Stories, edited by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant and The Immersion Book of
Steampunk, edited by Gareth D. Jones and Carmelo Rafala, as well as the un-
�
LOCUS February 2012 / 49

� Rec’d Reading – Gardner Dozois
classifiable (although vaguely steampunkish) but entertaining The Thackery
T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.
Short fiction stalwarts such as Robert Reed, Michael Swanwick, and Ken
MacLeod published a lot of good work this year, as usual, but so did prolific
younger writers such as Lavie Tidhar, Ken Liu, Cat Rambo, Catherynne
M. Valente, and Genevieve Valentine. Stories about Mars seemed popular this
year, as did stories about ecological terrorists.
There were relatively few changes in the market itself. Realms of Fantasy
died for the third time in three years, perhaps for good this time (since they
SHORT FICTION
SURVEY aND
RECOMMENDED
REaDING, 2011
by Rich Horton
Again it’s hard to
point to broad changes
in the short fiction
market. Realms
of Fantasy died, but
then it died the last
two years as well!
(Though this death
seems probably final.)
In the print area
Rich Horton (2010)
the ‘‘Big Three’’ US
magazines, Analog, Asimov’s,
and F&SF, remain. F&SF as a bimonthly
publication. Over in the UK,
TTA Press’s Interzone and Black
Static continued in solid shape: each
put out six fine issues. There were
only the usual minor changes in the
smaller presses, though there is a continuing
movement online. (For example,
Kaleidotrope moves online beginning
in 2012.)
Indeed, the distinction between electronic
publication and print publication
is perhaps diminishing – at any rate,
most if not all of the major print magazines
are also available in electronic editions. (It
may be that my recent acquisition of an e-reader
has made me more ready to notice that!)
Online, Tor.com continued to publish fine new
fiction (and graphic stories) in 2011. Long running
sites Strange Horizons, Orson Scott Card’s
Intergalactic Medicine Show, Fantasy Magazine,
Subterranean, and Clarkesworld each published
a great deal of very strong fiction. SF oriented
Lightspeed (a sister site to Fantasy), and fantasy-oriented
Beneath Ceaseless Skies continued
strongly. Other worthwhile sites include Abyss &
Apex, Ideomancer, Chiaroscuro, Apex, and Heroic
Fantasy Quarterly. Apex changed editors again, to
Lynne Thomas. And I should mention two strong
new sites, both of which debuted in 2010: Daily
Science Fiction and Redstone
Science Fiction.
This was a big year for urban
fantasy anthologies – and others
of a similar vein (paranormal,
dark fantasy). Ellen Datlow, as
you might expect, was a leader
here, with four books in that general
area, all very fine. Naked
City was the one overt ‘‘urban
fantasy’’ entry, with excellent
work from Lavie Tidhar, John
Crowley, and Kit Reed among
others. Supernatural Noir has a
bit more of a horror slant, and a
bit of focus on the ‘‘noirish’’ detective angle (common
in the subgenre, anyway), and it includes
find work from Caitlín R. Kiernan, Melanie Tem,
and Jeffrey Ford, among others. Datlow’s other
50 / LOCUS February 2012
two original anthologies had more of a vampire
theme. Blood and Other Cravings extended the
‘‘vampire’’ idea to consuming all sorts of ‘‘essential’’
stuff, not just blood – first rate stories
here came from Margo Lanagan, John Langan,
Kaaron Warren, Richard Bowes, and Lisa Tuttle.
And Teeth (coedited with Terri Windling) is more
of a YA book. It includes an outstanding Suzy
McKee Charnas story, and strong work from
Genevieve Valentine, Christopher Barzak, and
Tanith Lee.
The other big urban fantasy anthology was Down
These Strange Streets, edited by George R.R.
Martin & Gardner Dozois, which featured mostly
longer detective-type stories. It included one of
the very best stories of the year, Bradley Denton’s
‘‘The Adakian Eagle’’, as well as good
work by Carrie Vaughn, Laurie R.
King, and Glen Cook.
Steampunk is still fashionable, and
in that vein we saw a very nice YAoriented
book, Steampunk!, edited
by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, which
had strong work from Link herself, and
from M.T. Anderson, Dylan Horrocks,
Elizabeth Knox, and Christopher
Rowe. Ghosts by Gaslight, edited by
Jack Dann & Nick Gevers, advertises
itself as ‘‘stories of steampunk and
supernatural suspense,’’
and there is some steampunk
in there, but more generally just
ghost stories – mostly very good ones.
Strong work came from Paul Park,
Gene Wolfe, Theodora Goss, James
Morrow, and many others. And I also
enjoyed Steam Powered, a collection
of lesbian steampunk stories edited by
Joselle Vanderhooft, which featured
fine work from Rachel Manija Brown
and Mike Allen in particular.
In the straight SF arena, pickings
were a bit slimmer. One interesting anthology
came from MIT’s Technology
Review: TRSF, edited by Stephen Cass, which
resembles a magazine and is generally available
in the magazine section. It includes near future
stories ‘‘inspired by emerging technologies.’’
My favorite pieces came from Ken MacLeod
and Elizabeth Bear. Jonathan Strahan offered
two excellent all-SF books: Life on Mars, a
somewhat YA-oriented collection of stories of
Mars colonization; and Engineering Infinity.
From Life on Mars, I greatly enjoyed John
Barnes’s ‘‘Martian Heart’’, as well as stories
by Ian McDonald, Nnedi Okorafor, and the late
Kage Baker. In Engineering Infinity, standouts
came from Gwyneth Jones, David Moles, Peter
Watts, Robert Reed, and Barnes again. Strahan
also gave us the fourth volume of his excellent
unthemed series Eclipse. This as usual featured
a mix of SF and fantasy, with very good work
from Rachel Swirsky, Damien Broderick, Gwyneth
Jones, and James Patrick Kelly.
As ever, there were quite a few wonderful novellas
in 2011. From Asimov’s, I really liked ‘‘The
obviously have a dedicated readership, but not one large enough to support
the expense of a print edition, I really don’t understand why they don’t try this
one as an online electronic magazine). Weird Tales was sold to Marvin Kaye,
who took the unpopular step of dismissing the current staff of the recent Hugowinner
and announcing that he was taking the magazine in a nostalgically retro
direction, something few industry insiders thought would work. Karen Meisner
stepped down as fiction editor of Strange Horizons. Catherynne M. Valente
stepped down as editor of Apex Magazine, replaced by Lynne M. Thomas. And,
it was announced that in 2012 Fantasy would be merged with Lightspeed into
one electronic magazine that publishes both fantasy and science fiction.
–Gardner Dozois
Man Who Bridged the Mist’’ by Kij Johnson, about
an engineer building a bridge across a strange ‘‘river’’
of a mistlike substance; Paul McAuley’s ‘‘The
Choice’’, about a young man whose life is upended
when he gets involved with the finding of some
alien technology; and Mary Robinette Kowal’s
‘‘Kiss Me Twice’’, a murder mystery involving
an AI assistant to the police – and a murder that
may center on AI rights. From F&SF, Alexandra
Duncan’s ‘‘Rampion’’, a romantic/tragic story
of an inter-religious love affair in the Umayyid
Caliphate (Spain in the time of the Moors); Carolyn
Ives Gilman’s ‘‘The Ice Owl’’, set in her Halfway
Human future and telling of a girl who ends up
being tutored by a man potentially implicated in
a genocide somewhat modeled on the Rwandan
genocide; and Robert Reed’s ‘‘The Ants of
Flanders’’, a strange alien invasion story involving
a high school boy who plays a key role. The best
novella I saw in an anthology this year was ‘‘The
Adakian Eagle’’ by Bradley Denton, from Down
These Strange Streets, set in the Aleutians during
WWII, with Dashiell Hammett involved in a
murder mystery. I also liked Ken Liu’s ‘‘The Man
Who Ended History’’, from Panverse 3, which
uses a method of past viewing to examine Japanese
atrocities during WWII, and Elizabeth Hand’s
‘‘Near Zennor’’ (a Book of Horrors), about a man
exploring his late wife’s visit to a children’s book
writer as a teen.
And of course several excellent novellas
appeared as chapbooks. These
included Blue and Gold by K.J. Parker
(Subterranean), which I raved about
in this space last year based on an advance
copy, but which was delayed until
2011. From WSFA Press (also serialized
at Clarkesworld) there was Catherynne
M. Valente’s magnificent, moving
story of the life of an AI, Silently and
Very Fast. Perhaps the best from PS
Publishing (though I missed several of
these) was Lavie Tidhar’s unusual look
at Jesus, Jesus and the Eightfold Path.
And Kristin Livdahl’s A
Brood of Foxes (Aqueduct
Press) is a charming and
quite strange story about
a girl, her sort of adopted
mother, and a fox in a
magically weird future.
Also, from Twelfth Planet
Press came an interesting
experiment – paired novellas
about two linked cities,
one in the sky and one
beneath it: above/Below,
respectively by Stephanie
Campisi and Ben Peek.
Last year I was somewhat disappointed, over all,
by the novelettes, but this year things are back to
normal. Exceptional examples include Nina Allan’s
‘‘The Silver Wind’’, about a man in an oppressive
future who becomes intrigued with the possibility
of time travel back to a time before his wife’s death.
Suzy McKee Charnas’s ‘‘Late Bloomer’’ is about a

oy who becomes fascinated with the vampires visiting
his family’s antique mall. Kelly Link’s ‘‘The
Summer People’’ mixes a Southern Gothic sort of
setting with the mysterious title folks. K.J. Parker’s
‘‘A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong’’ melds blackly
cynical humor with wrenching moral questions
(not unlike Blue and Gold or Parker’s novels) in
telling of the entanglement of a famous but ordinary
composer and his most brilliant student, an
amoral genius. Yoon Ha Lee, in ‘‘Ghostweight’’,
returns to her central subject, war, in telling of a
deserter urged to revenge by the ghost that haunts
her. Rachel Swirsky’s ‘‘Fields of Gold’’ is one of
the best and most moving afterlife fantasies I’ve
seen recently. Other first-rate novelettes include
Paul Park’s ‘‘Mysteries of the Old Quarter’’, Jay
Lake’s ‘‘The Long Walk Home’’, Dylan Horrocks’s
‘‘Steam Girl’’, Tom Purdom’s ‘‘A Response from
EST17’’, Catherynne M. Valente’s ‘‘The Girl Who
Ruled Fairyland, for a Little While’’, and Gavin
Grant’s ‘‘Widows in the World’’.
In short story I think my favorite was ‘‘The
Sandal-Bride’’ by Genevieve Valentine, which just
bowled me over, about a woman who changes a
man’s life over the course of a temporary marriage.
Chris Lawson’s ‘‘Canterbury Hollow’’ is also very
impressive, as two people face their lottery-mandated
death on a dying world. Theodora Goss’s ‘‘Pug’’
is delightful and affecting, about a character from
the background of one of the most famous of novels
who learns to follow the title dog into different
worlds. ‘‘East of Furious’’ by Jonathan Carroll is
twisty and clever and dark, told by a divorce lawyer
about one of his cases, concerning a sort of modern
alchemist and her Russian husband. Among
the many other excellent short stories I’ll mention
‘‘The Last Sophia’’ by C.S.E. Cooney, ‘‘Walking
Stick Fires’’ by Alan DeNiro, ‘‘And Weep Like
Alexander’’ by Neil Gaiman, ‘‘Choose Your Own
Adventure’’ by Kat Howard, ‘‘Younger Women’’
by Karen Joy Fowler, ‘‘The Sighted Watchmaker’’
by Vylar Kaftan, ‘‘Mulberry Boys’’ by Margo
Lanagan, ‘‘Some of Them Closer’’ by Marissa
Lingen, ‘‘Woman Leaves Room’’ by Robert Reed,
‘‘My Chivalric Fiasco’’ by George Saunders, ‘‘The
Smell of Orange Groves’’ by Lavie Tidhar, ‘‘Clean’’
by John Kessel, and ‘‘The Cartographer Wasps and
the Anarchist Bees’’ by E. Lily Yu.
Looking at the field as a whole, the one characteristic
I can pick out for 2011 is a higher than
usual preponderance of fantasy over SF among the
stories I preferred. I don’t necessarily think this is
a trend, however, as opposed to a blip, though perhaps
the evident commercial weight of urban fantasy
and related subgenres is having an effect. In
terms of quality, I’d say 2011 was a strong but not
transcendent year, perhaps still reflecting my sense
that we are in a bit of a holding pattern.
Top Short Fiction of the Year
‘‘The Adakian Eagle’’, Bradley Denton
(Down These Strange Streets)
‘‘East of Furious’’, Jonathan Carroll
(Conjunctions 56)
‘‘Late Bloomer’’, Suzy McKee Charnas (Teeth)
‘‘Rampion’’, Alexandra Duncan (F&SF 5-6/11)
‘‘Pug’’, Theodora Goss (Asimov’s 7/11)
‘‘The Man Who Bridged the Mist’’, Kij
Johnson (Asimov’s 10/11)
‘‘The Summer People’’, Kelly Link (Tin House,
Fall ’11; Steampunk!)
‘‘A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong’’, K.J.
Parker (Subterranean, Winter 2011)
‘‘Fields of Gold’’, Rachel Swirsky (Eclipse 4)
‘‘The Sandal-Bride’’, Genevieve Valentine
(Fantasy, March 2011)
–Rich Horton�
LOCUS February 2012 / 51

2011 book summary
The number of books broke 3,000 for the second
year in 2011, as we saw a fifth year in a row of
record numbers. New books were up slightly
but reprints dropped, as publishers seek ways to
tighten their belts while pumping more and more
new books. At this point, we’re still only tracking
print books, but there has been explosive growth
in e-books, making print reprints less necessary
– where harcovers and trade paperbacks both
saw their numbers increase, the traditional massmarket
paperback reprints dropped significantly,
as did new mass market titles; (AAP reports during
the year suggest mass-market sales are down
significantly as well).
Among publisher changes affecting our figures,
Dorchester, which stopped publishing print books
in August 2010, started bringing out selected trade
paperbacks in 2011, though the few we’ve seen so
far are all print-on-demand editions. We saw a
few titles from Amazon Encore for the first time
in 2011, though the reprint line started in 2009;
we have yet to see any print titles from Amazon’s
new SF imprint, 47North, but several are scheduled
for 2012. Random House added two YA imprints,
Ember and Bluefire, the latter specifically for
fantasy titles. HarperCollins changed the name
of their SF imprint from Eos to Harper Voyager
at the beginning of the year. Harlequin’s Nocturne
imprint, a strictly paranormal revamp of their
Silhouette Nocturne line, saw its first full year
in 2011.
Tracking print-on-demand books remains
problematic for us; the books don’t really exist until
a copy is ordered and printed, so they don’t really
compare to traditional books. Some small presses
order a large number of copies printed with POD
technology and distribute them through traditional
channels, and say that shouldn’t count as POD – but
if that stock sells out, the books are usually still
available through the POD system, and we can’t
tell the difference. (One exception: if the initial
print run is put out as a signed, numbered limited
edition, we don’t count it as POD.) Even major
publishers are using POD to keep some backlist
in print. Complicating matters even more, there’s
no way to spot POD titles unless the book has
the distinctive bar code on the last page, but not
all publishers use that marking system. Counting
reprints and reissues becomes pointless. Print-ondemand
is gaining some respect, used by more
and more quality small presses for new works
and by mainstream publishers to keep backlist
in print. However, POD remains the staple of
self-publishing and subsidy services, which come
very close to being vanity presses, and churn out
an appalling number of really bad books, making
it hard to spot the occasional gem among them.
We try not to list books we know are from vanity
presses, but it’s hard to tell for certain anymore.
POD books only get listed if we actually seen
them here at Locus, and we know we’re only
seeing a small fraction of the books available;
publishers are reluctant to send the relatively
expensive review copies, particularly of reprint
titles we won’t usually review. We don’t include
the strictly POD publishers on most of our main
lists; at least 47 publishers sent us only POD titles
in 2011 (down from 61 in 2010, but still up from
from 42 in 2009), but they’re all small publishers,
with one exception: Dorchester. Only six had five
or more titles, the same as last year: Black Coat
Press (33 titles), Arc Manor/Phoenix Pick (24),
Hippocampus Press (8), Dark Quest Books (6),
Dorchester (5), and Jupiter Gardens (5). These are
only the POD books we saw, but we know many
52 / LOCUS February 2012
Cumulative Book Survey
HARDBOUND TRADE PB MASS MKT. PB ALL BOOKS %NEW
2001 New 493 (+12%) 370 (+40%) 347 (+7%) 1210 (+18%)
Reprint 205 (+3%) 390 (+35%) 353 (-15%) 948 (+5%)
Total 698 (+9%) 760 (+40%) 700 (-5%) 2158 (+12%) 56%
2002 New 548 (+11%) 379 (+2%) 344 (-1%) 1271 (+5%)
Reprint 209 (+2%) 386 (-1%) 375 (+6%) 970 (+2%)
Total 757 (+8%) 765 (+1%) 719 (+3%) 2241 (+4%) 57%
2003 New 620 (+13%) 386 (+2%) 369 (+7%) 1375 (+8%)
Reprint 240 (+15%) 368 (-5%) 446 (+19%) 1054 (+9%)
Total 860 (+14%) 754 (-1%) 815 (+13%) 2429 (+8%) 57%
2004 New 653 (+5%) 410 (+6%) 354 (-4%) 1417 (+3%)
Reprint 224 (-7%) 418 (+14%) 491 (+10%) 1133 (+7%)
Total 877 (+2%) 828 (+10%) 845 (+4%) 2550 (+5%) 56%
2005 New 689 (+5%) 407 (-1%) 373 (+5%) 1469 (+4%)
Reprint 224 (–) 400 (-4%) 423 (-14%) 1047 (-8%)
Total 913 (+4%) 807 (-3%) 802 (-5%) 2516 (-1%) 58%
2006 New 615 (-11%) 466 (+14%) 439 (+18%) 1520 (+3%)
Reprint 227 (+1%) 370 (-8%) 378 (-11%) 975 (-7%)
Total 842 (-8%) 836 (+4%) 817 (+2%) 2495 (-1%) 61%
2007 New 693 (+13%) 534 (+15%) 483 (+10%) 1710 (+13%)
Reprint 152 (-33%) 420 (+14%) 441 (+17%) 1013 (+4%)
Total 845 (–) 954 (+14%) 924 (+13%) 2723 (+9%) 63%
2008 New 670 (-3%) 493 (-8%) 508 (+5%) 1671 (-2%)
Reprint 250 (+64%) 457 (+9%) 465 (+5%) 1172 (+16%)
Total 920 (+9%) 950 (–) 973 (+5%) 2843 (+4%) 59%
2009 New 761 (+14%) 648 (+31%) 533 (+5%) 1942 (+16%)
Reprint 82 (-67%) 462 (+1%) 415 (-11%) 959 (-18%)
Total 843 (-8%) 1110 (+17%) 948 (-3%) 2901 (+2%) 67%
2010 New 759 (–) 779 (+20%) 562 (+5%) 2100 (+8%)
Reprint 36 (-56%) 538 (+16%) 382 (-8%) 956 (–)
Total 795 (-6%) 1317 (+19%) 944 (–) 3056 ( +5%) 69%
2011 New 810 (+7%) 816 (+5%) 514 (-9%) 2140 (+2%)
Reprint 57 (+58%) 539 (–) 335 (-12%) 931 (-3%)
Total 867 (+9%) 1355 (+3%) 849 (-10%) 3071 (–) 70%
more are out there. Wildside Press, probably our
biggest POD publisher, only sent us four books
from their Borgo Press imprint in 2011, all POD
– but Amazon lists hundreds of print book titles
from Wildside and Borgo for 2010, about 120 of
those tagged as SF and fantasy.
We listed a record 3,071 titles of interest in
2011, only 15 more than in 2010; by percentage,
the numbers were essentially flat. We listed 3,176
in our ‘‘Books Received’’ column, but those
figures are adjusted at the end of the year. All the
books counted here have been listed there, but
not everything listed there is counted here. We
delete associational books of no real SF interest,
chapbooks, and UK books distributed in the US.
Books published in 2010 but not seen until 2011
are included, as are 2012 books seen in December
2011. Where there are simultaneous hardcover
and trade paperback editions, we count only one,
usually the hardcovers. If we see only one state
or edition, we note the possible existence of the
other(s) in ‘‘Books Received’’, but don’t count
them. Editions with multiple bindings and states
are only counted once, unless there are differences
in the text. Completely rewritten books are
counted as new, but those with minor revisions or
corrections are considered reprints. First American
editions are considered new, even if the UK
editions have already been listed in the ‘‘British
Books’’ column. Omnibus volumes are counted
as new even if all the contents have previously
appeared separately; however, if a book is broken
down into multiple volumes they’re considered
reprints unless there is significant added material.
Trade and mass-market paperbacks are
distinguished (almost) solely by the physical size
of the book, rather than the returnability of the
product, the criterion used by most publishers
and booksellers. Anything larger or smaller than
a standard mass-market rack size is considered
a trade paperback; the major exception is the
‘‘premium’’ or ‘‘tall rack-size’’ format, which
retains the rack width, but is taller; we’re counting
those as mass-market. Some publishers produce
mass-market-size books marketed as trade
paperback, but we generally count them as mass
market.
New titles hit a new high for the third year in a
row, up 2% to 2,140. Reprints dropped 3% to 931,
their lowest point since 2000. The percentage of
new books rose to 70%, setting a record high for
the third year in a row. We’ve always considered a
50/50 split theoretically ideal, since many originals
only earn out their advances if reissued. The
numbers suggest a lot of publishers are banking
more on new titles, but there’s also the question of
e-books, which we haven’t been counting. Figures
from the Association of American Publishers
show e-books sales way up, while mass-market
paperback sales have dropped, suggesting e-books
are filling the market niche once occupied by the
mass-market reprint. Still, there were probably
more reprints than we counted; reissues in
�

Total Books Published, 2011 Total Books Published By SF Imprint, 2011
PUBLISHER HC TP PB TOTAL
New Repr. New Repr. New Repr.
Penguin Group USA 100 1 65 57 141 67 431
HarperCollins 93 8 17 72 35 32 257
Tor 72 2 19 57 6 89 245
Random House 77 4 34 42 35 36 228
S&S/Pocket 64 - 24 60 51 14 213
Hachette/Orbit US 41 - 24 31 22 18 136
Harlequin/Worldwide 3 - 32 2 61 3 101
St. Martin’s 25 - 24 19 15 8 91
Baen 19 - 15 3 3 35 75
Scholastic 28 1 8 23 - - 60
Kensington - - 30 2 16 8 56
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 23 1 4 26 - 1 55
DAW 12 1 2 2 23 13 53
Subterranean Press 27 22 1 3 - - 53
Night Shade Books 7 - 28 7 - - 42
Black Library US 3 - 9 - 22 5 39
Bloomsbury USA 19 - 5 14 - - 38
Macmillan US 19 - 4 12 - - 35
Disney/Hyperion 18 - 4 12 - - 34
Rebellion/SolarisUS - - 10 - 20 - 30
Angry Robot US - - 1 - 25 2 28
Prometheus/Pyr 2 - 25 1 - - 28
Sourcebooks 3 - 6 5 13 - 27
Wizards of the Coast 2 - 5 2 16 2 27
Barnes & Noble/Fall River 8 6 1 6 - - 21
Candlewick Press 10 - 1 7 - - 18
Egmont USA 12 - - 6 - - 18
Prime Books - - 17 1 - - 18
McFarland - - 16 - - - 16
Hades/EDGE - - 15 - - - 15
Llewellyn - - 12 - - - 12
ChiZine - - 11 - - - 11
Abrams 8 - - 2 - - 10
Tachyon Publications - - 9 1 - - 10
Aqueduct Press - - 9 - - - 9
Bold Strokes Books - - 9 - - - 9
CD Publications 6 2 1 - - - 9
Continuum 3 - 5 - - - 8
Paizo/Planet Stories - - 5 - 3 - 8
Perseus Books Group 2 - 3 1 - 2 8
Small Beer Press 3 - 2 3 - - 8
Viz Media/Haikasoru 2 - 5 1 - - 8
Overlook 5 2 - - - - 7
PM Press - - 6 1 - - 7
Ticonderoga Pubs - - 6 - - - 6
Galaxy - - 1 3 1 - 5
Gauntlet Press 4 - 1 - - - 5
Haffner Press 5 - - - - - 5
Thomas Nelson 2 - 3 - - - 5
Quirk Books 1 - 4 - - - 5
Twilight Times Books - - 5 - - - 5
U. of Nebraska Press - - 3 2 - - 5
225 Misc. Publishers 82 7 270 53 6 0 418
Totals: 277 Publishers 810 57 816 539 514 335 3071
CHART 1: TOP PUBLISHERS TOTAL BOOKS**
2011 ’10 ’09 ’08 ’07 ’06 ’05 ’04 ’03
Penguin Group (USA) 431 469 435 438 439 348 303 309 264
HarperCollins 257 230 225 240 205 175 194 191 156
Tor 245 280 240 237 259 255 240 257 281
Random House 228 234 284 289 + 251 + 203 + 226 + 249 + 209 +
S&S/Pocket 213 225 183 141 160 140 148 130 171
Hachette/Orbit US°° 136 124 97 89 65 55 45 44 47
Harlequin/Worldwide 101 112 90 85 64 60 27 26 10
St. Martin’s 91 80 84 53 45 35 25 26 23
Baen 75 72 73 71 65 56 72 67 72
Scholastic 60 53 47 47 48 36 44 44 39
°°previously Warner/Little, Brown
**Does not include POD books
+ includes Bantam/Doubleday/Dell/Ballantine/Del Rey
PUBLISHER HC TP PB TOTALS
New Repr. New Repr. New Repr. 2011 ’10 ’09
Tor 68 2 17 54 6 81 228 269 227
Ace 19 1 2 5 40 29 96 105 95
Baen 19 - 15 3 3 35 75 72 73
Roc 14 - 5 5 19 24 67 55 61
Del Rey 14 1 13 3 16 14 61 61 79
Orbit US 5 - 20 4 18 9 56 60 42
DAW 12 1 2 2 23 13 53 55 55
Subterranean 27 22 - 3 - - 52 45 41
Night Shade 7 - 28 7 - - 42 29 33
Black Library US 3 - 9 - 22 5 39 37 35
Harper Voyager US 7 - 2 2 16 9 36 38 * 41 *
Angry Robot US - - 1 - 25 2 28 21 -
Harlequin Nocturne - - - - 28 - 28 22 + 29 +
Pyr 2 - 25 1 - - 28 32 28
WizardsOTCoast 2 - 5 2 16 2 27 38 55
Solaris US - - - - 19 1 20 21 5
Prime Books - - 17 1 - - 18 15 12
Spectra 2 - 7 3 3 3 18 23 26
Luna 1 - 8 1 - 3 13 15 11
ChiZine Pubs - - 11 - - - 11 10 7
Abaddon US - - 10 - - - 10 13 -
Tachyon - - 9 1 - - 10 0 8
EDGE SF - - 10 - - - 10 8 5
TOTAL: 202 27 216 97 254 230 1026 1053 968
*figures for EOS + includes Silhouette Nocturne
Graph 1: Publishing History
Total New Books - - - Reprints
CHART 2: TOP PUBLISHERS ORIGINAL BOOKS, 2011
2011 ’10 ’09 ’08 ’07 ’06 ’05 ’04 ’03
Penguin Group (USA) 306 300 275 248 274 224 177 166 139
Random House 146 152 189 174 + 155 + 122 + 117 + 113 + 109 +
HarperCollins 145 132 153 120 123 89 96 87 63
S&S/Pocket 139 143 134 88 103 101 99 91 125
Tor 97 113 109 104 116 114 102 113 112
Harlequin/Worldwide 96 92 74 75 56 45 25 25 10
Hachette/Orbit US°° 87 90 62 53 40 32 28 19 29
St. Martin’s 64 65 54 36 32 44 16 17 19
Kensington 46 24 25 9 19 20 14 17 18
Baen 37 38 33 36 31 31 40 40 43
DAW 37 35 36 33 36 38 35 34 37
Scholastic 36 29 26 22 24 16 21 21 29
Night Shade Books 35 21 20 9 20 19 12 15 11
Black Library US 34 33 42 52 49 61 68 39 28
Rebellion/Solaris 30 32 5 6 10 - - - -
Subterranean Press 28 32 29 24 28 18 21 9 12
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 27 25 21 22 22 17 18 21 23
Prometheus/Pyr 27 29 21 12 13 16 14 - -
Angry Robot US 26 20 - - - - - - -
°°prev. Warner/Little, Brown + includes Bantam/D’day/Dell/Ball./Del Rey
LOCUS February 2012 / 53

� 2011 Book Summary
particular are hard to spot unless
there’s a change in the price or cover.
Graph #1 compares the publishing
history for new and reprint titles
since 1979.
The overall number of hardcovers
went up by 9%. Original hardcovers
rose by 7% to a new high with 810
titles. Hardcover reprints rose 58%,
more than making up for 2010’s 56%
drop, though numbers remain well
below those before 2008, the last
year we included Science Fiction
Book Club hardcover reprints. (We
saw four books from the SFBC in
2011, only two reprints, but SFBC
had well over 100 hardcover reprint
titles scheduled for 2011, as usual.)
Penguin Group USA had the most
original hardcovers with 100, up
from 94 last year; hardcovers were
33% of their original books, up from
31%. Scholastic was the top-ten
publisher with the highest percentage
of their originals in hardcover with
78%, down from 97%. Five of the
top ten had hardcovers as more than
50% of their original books, up from
three: Scholastic with 78%, Tor with
74%, HarperCollins 64%, Random
House 53%, and Baen with 51%.
Harlequin/Worldwide Library had
the lowest percentage among the top
ten with only 3% hardcovers. Overall, hardcovers
were 38% of all original books, up from 36%. We
saw seven POD hardcovers, up from six last year.
Publishers continue to shift towards trade
paperbacks, which hit a new high for the third
year in a row, up 3% to 1,355 titles. Originals and
reprints both reached new highs, originals up 5%
to 816; reprints held steady by percentage, up by
a single title to 539. Six of the top ten publishers
increased their number of trade paperbacks, while
four decreased their number. Penguin Group USA
remains the leader with 122.
Mass-market paperbacks dropped 10% overall
to 849; originals fell 9% to 514, while reprints
dropped 12% to 335. Media tie-ins were 14% of
original paperbacks with 72 titles, up from 12%
last year. New paranormal romances were 38%
of original paperbacks, down from 42% last year.
Together, tie-ins and romances accounted for
52% of mass-market originals, down from 54%
last year. Some major publishers still bring out
more than half of their originals in mass market:
Rebellion/Solaris/Abaddon US with 67%, Black
Library US with 65%, Harlequin/Worldwide
with 64%, DAW with 62%, and Rebellion/
Solaris/Abaddon US with 53%. Numerically,
Penguin Group USA holds onto the lead with 141
mass-market originals, followed by Harlequin/
Worldwide with 61, Simon & Schuster/Pocket
with 51, and HarperCollins and Random House
with 35 each.
Penguin Group USA retained the lead in total
books published with 431 titles, down from 469.
Their total output was 23% hardcover, 28% trade
paperback, and 48% mass market; their original
titles were 33% hardcover, 21% trade paperback,
and 46% mass market. HarperCollins moved up a
couple of notches into second place with 257 titles,
down from 280; they had 39% hardcover, 35%
trade paperback, and 26% mass market; original
titles were 64% hardcover, 12% trade paperback,
and 24% mass market. Tor dropped back to
third with 245 titles, down from 280, with 30%
54 / LOCUS February 2012
CHART 3: ORIGINAL BOOKS
2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003
SF Novels* 305 285 232 249 250 223 258 253 236
Fantasy Novels* 660 614 572 439 460 463 414 389 340
Horror Novels* 229 251 251 175 198 271 212 172 171
Anthologies 125 121 101 92 90 107 89 112 97
Reference 27 38 25 22 22 27 39 32 27
Collections 111 138 133 114 100 89 107 113 113
Media-Related 118 114 127 135 168 206 198 199 213
Paranormal Rom.* 416 384 339 328 290 ° ° ° °
Art/Humor/Poetry 45 61 58 44 61 42 45 44 57
History/Criticism 47 43 51 34 35 37 50 45 53
Omnibus 57 46 44 35 37 53 47 51 67
Misc. 4 3 8 2 3 3 5 4 2
* includes YA °included in other categories
Graph 2: Subject History
SF Fantasy - - - Horror
hardcover, 31% trade paperback, and 39% mass
market; original titles were 74% hardcover, 20%
trade paper, and 6% mass market. Random House
followed in fourth with 228 titles, down from
234; their titles were 36% hardcover, 33% trade
paperback, and 31% mass market; their originals
were 53% hardcover, 23% trade paperback, and
24% mass market. Overall, books were 28%
hardcover, 44% trade paperback, and 28% mass
market; original books were 38% hardcover, 38%
trade paperback, and 24% mass market.
New titles are broken down by subject in Chart
#3. The total count doesn’t quite match our count
by publisher; the two are compiled separately, and
discrepancies creep in despite our best efforts. We
counted 1,194 new novels, up 1,150 new novels, up
4% from last year; they were 56% of all original
titles, up from 55% last year; and 39% of the
total books. That number includes 376 youngadult
novels, but does not include another 294
paranormal romance novels and 103 tie-in novels.
Numerically, original SF and fantasy novels
were up while horror dropped. Fantasy novels led,
up 7% to 660 titles, or 31% of the new books total.
SF novels came in second, up 7% with 305 titles, or
14% of new books. Horror novels followed in third
place, down 9% to 229 titles, 11% of the new books
total. Media tie-ins were up 4% with 118 titles, 6%
of new books. Paranormal romances were up 8%
to 416 titles, 19% of new books.
The 305 original SF novels include 72 youngadult
novels, 24% of the new SF total, up from
20% in 2010 and 16% in 2009. They also include
41 SF first novels, 13% of the SF total, up from 9%.
Fantasy’s 660 original novels include 234 YA
novels, 35% of the fantasy total, up from 34%.
There were 60 fantasy first novels, 9% of the
fantasy total, down from 10%.
The 229 original horror novels include 70 YA
novels, 31% of the new horror total, up from 24%.
At least 29 (41%) of the YA horror novels were
part of series, down from 63% in 2010. There were
seven horror first novels, 3% of the horror total. We
try to limit our count to supernatural
horror, leaving out strictly nonfantasy
horror, but some usually
creeps in; that’s balanced somewhat
by all the small-press horror that
we miss. For the last couple of
years, we’ve been trying to be more
selective about classifying vampires,
werewolves, ghosts, zombies, and
so on as horror, what with all the
paranormal mysteries and romances,
not to mention zombie mash-ups. We
still counted 37 original vampire
horror novels this year, down from
48. Paranormal romances add at
least another 59 new novels featuring
vampires. Zombies haven’t managed
to surpass vampires numerically,
but remain a hot trend; we counted
20 original zombie horror novels;
overall, zombies cropped up in at
least 46 books including anthologies,
paranormal romances, humorous
mash-ups, and SF.
Young-adult originals were up 24
to 477 titles. Fantasy led for the 16th
year in a row, with 234 titles, 49%
of the new YA total. Paranormal
romance moved into second place
with 101 titles (21%), followed by
SF with 72 titles (15%) and horror
with 70 (15%) . Vampires remain the
biggest trend in YA fiction, with 33
titles (17 of those romances); fairies/
fae featured in at least another 17
titles; werewolves appeared in at least 11, and
dragons in ten. Zombies only showed up for sure
in four.
We saw 128 first novels, up from 119. The
accuracy of this figure is always in question; some
publishers won’t admit a book is a first novel,
while others make authors with poor sales use a
pseudonym, and promote them as new discoveries.
Recent trends have probably added to the problem;
mash-ups are often pseudonymous, and male
authors writing paranormal romances or urban
fantasies with kick-ass heroines tend to take a
female or gender-neutral pen name. Fantasy first
novels continue to dominate with 60 titles, down
from 62. SF was second with 41, more than double
last year’s 19. Paranormal romances followed with
20, up from 11; horror had seven, down from 20.
Major publishers were responsible for 78 first
novels, or 61%, down from 77%. HarperCollins led
with 15, followed by Penguin Group USA with 14
and Simon & Schuster/Pocket with 13; small press
Night Shade Books also had 13. We identified 12
first novels as POD, down from 13.
Original media-related titles rose 4% to 118
titles. They were 6% of the new books total, up
from 5%. Only fiction titles are counted here, with
103 novels plus eight omnibuses, five anthologies,
and two collections. We don’t count media-related
non-fiction exept for a few items of special interest
(art, literary criticism) counted as regular nonfiction.
Black Library led with 34 gaming tie-ins,
the same as last year: 20 Warhammer 40,000
and 14 Warhammer titles. Wizards of the Coast
followed with 23 gaming tie-ins: 13 Forgotten
Realms, six Dungeons & Dragons, two Dark
Sun, and one each for Eberron and Magic: The
Gathering. Simon & Schuster/Pocket had 19 titles:
12 Star Trek titles plus six gaming tie-ins, and one
TV tie-in. Del Rey had 17 including eight Star
Wars titles and seven gaming tie-ins. Tor had six
titles: five gaming and one movie tie-in. Ace had
four tie-ins: three gaming and one TV; Paizo had
four gaming tie-ins in their Pathfinder Tales series.

Paranormal romances were second
only to fantasy for the fifth year in a
row, with 416 titles, up from 384. The
number includes 16 anthologies and
four omnibuses. It’s tricky to decide
which titles belong to this category,
unless they’re specifically marketed
as paranormal romance. All have
major SF or fantasy elements, but also
significant romance (in some cases,
erotic content). Some are packaged
as urban fantasy or paranormal
mysteries, but have enough romance
to qualify. Penguin Group USA
leads with 110 titles (including 38
under the Berkley Sensation imprint
and 24 Signet Eclipse). Harlequin is
second with 61 titles (28 Nocturne,
12 Mira, and 10 HQN), followed
by HarperCollins with 43, Simon &
Schuster/Pocket with 37, Kensington
with 34, St. Martin’s with 26, and
Random House with 23. These days,
most paranormals are set in worlds
where multiple supernatural species co-exist, but
we noted 66 titles in which vampires play a major
role, 29 with werewolves, 22 with angels, and seven
each with zombies and dragons. Among the more
humorous romance titles this year we saw: Devil
Without a Cause; How to Flirt with a Naked
Werewolf, and It Happened One Bite.
We had 45 titles in our Art/Humor/Poetry
category, down from 61, The usual mix of subjects
turned up this year, including 18 graphic novels,
four books of poetry, three humor books, and three
children’s picture books. We saw five overviews
of the field, one how-to art book, and four books
focusing on individual artists.
New anthologies were up 3% to 125 titles.
Of those, 83 had mostly original stories and 42
mostly reprint. An additional five anthologies
were counted in the Media Related category,
down from six last year. Another 16 were counted
with the paranormal romances, the same as last
year; of those, 10 were anonymously edited. It’s
hard to define a ‘‘theme’’ anthology, since editors
have to have some reason to choose stories, but
excluding romances and tie-ins there were at least
93 anthologies with specific themes, 11 in shared
worlds. Eight anthologies had the word ‘‘Best’’
in the title; all were year’s bests, down from ten
last year. Usually there are a lot of pun-filled
anthology titles, but this year they were almost all
listed as paranormal romances, such as The Real
Werewives of Vampire County and The Bite
Before Christmas.
We saw 111 new collections, down from 138.
Collections aren’t categorized as SF, fantasy, or
horror, but we did count eight YA collections, up
from three. Small presses published 89 collections,
down from 111 collections; they were 80% of the
collections, the same as last year. Subterranean
again had the most titles with 12, followed by Black
Coat Press with seven, Penguin Group USA with
six, and Random House/Del Rey and Aqueduct
Press each with five.
Reference had 27 titles, down from 38 in 2010.
History/Criticism had 47, up from 51. We saw
57 omnibus editions, up from 46; another eight
were counted as media related, and four with
paranormal romance.
Charts #1 and #2 show the top publishers
for total and original books. The Total Books
Published listing gives the large picture; it includes
all publishers with five or more books, with the
exception of mainly print-on-demand publishers,
included with the rest under Miscellaneous. In the
charts, we try to make the current figures more
CHART 4: RECOMMENDED BOOKS
2011 ’10 ’09 ’08 ’07 ’06 ’05 ’04 ’03 ’02
Random House 16 12 14 14 + 15 + 15 + 12 + 16 + 18 + 13 +
Hachette/Orbit US 12 7 5 4 2 - - - 3 3
Night Shade Books 12 12 7 8 8 6 - 6 5 2
Penguin Group USA 11 12 7 15 13 19 16 13 13 14
Tor 11 10 12 13 15 15 22 16 13 24
HarperCollins US 9 6 7 9 9 11 17 19 11 18
Little, Brown UK/Orbit 9 4 3 5 4 1 7 2 3 1
Orion/Gollancz 7 7 6 10 8 10 7 6 5 9
Prime 6 4 4 4 3 5 2 1 4 -
PS Publishing 5 4 7 3 4 6 7 3 4 5
Subterranean 5 13 8 7 5 5 5 2 3 3
HarperCollins UK 4 3 1 1 2 4 4 2 4 2
Simon & Schuster 4 4 3 1 4 2 3 4 2 3
Small Beer 4 4 - 3 1 1 3 2 2 2
Aqueduct 3 1 2 1 2 - - 1 - -
Hodder & Stoughton 3 1 1 - - 3 1 1 1 1
Macmillan 3 1 3 - 3 5 4 - 3 2
Scholastic 3 3 - 3 1 2 - 1 - 1
St. Martin’s 3 2 1 3 3 3 3 3 3 5
Tachyon 3 2 6 5 6 4 5 4 - -
+ includes Bantam/Doubleday/Dell/Ballantine/Del Rey
compatible with past figures by adjusting the older
figures to reflect mergers and combinations; there
were no real changes this year. The main list has
52 publishers with five or more books; new or
returning to the list this year are Bold Strokes
Books, Galaxy, Gauntlet Press, Haffner Press,
Thomas Nelson, PM Press, Quirk Books, Twilight
Times Books, and University of Nebraska Press.
We saw books from 225 Miscellaneous
publishers, up from 200 in 2010. Not all the
Miscellaneous publishers are small press, but most
of the small press is under Miscellaneous. Fifteen
small-press publishers made it out of Miscellaneous
onto the main list: Aqueduct Press, Bold Strokes
Books, CD Publications, ChiZine Publications,
Gauntlet Press, Hades/EDGE, Haffner Press,
Night Shade Books, PM Press, Prime Books,
Small Beer Press, Subterranean Press, Tachyon
Publications, Ticonderoga Publications, and
Twilight Times Books.
Chart #1 shows the top publishers’ totals for the
past nine years. Penguin Group USA led for the
eighth year in a row with 431 titles, and a significant
lead over the closest contender. HarperCollins
moved up two notches into second place with
257, knocking Tor back to third with 245, and
Random House back to fourth with 228. Below
that, publishers followed in the same positions
as in 2010: Simon & Schuster/Pocket with 213
titles, Hachette/Orbit US with 136, Harlequin/
Worldwide Library with 101, St. Martin’s with
91, and Baen with 75. Moving onto the bottom of
the list was Scholastic with 60 titles. Five top-ten
publishers increased their output: HarperCollins,
Hachette/Orbit US, St. Martin’s, Baen, and
Scholastic. The rest all decreased their output.
We saw only four titles from Science Fiction Book
Club (SFBC), even though they had well over 100
titles on their schedule, which would, if seen, have
placed them sixth or seventh on the list.
The top publishers of original books are shown
on Chart #2. Penguin Group USA dominates
again here, with 306 new titles; Random House
is the closest contender with 146. HarperCollins
moved back into third with 145, knocking Simon
& Schuster/Pocket down to fourth with 139.
Holding steady are Tor in fifth with 97, Harlequin/
Worldwide Library sixth with 96, Hachette/Orbit
US with 87, and St. Martin’s eighth with 64.
There was considerable shuffling around below
that. New to the list is Kensington, in ninth place
with 46; other newcomers are Night Shade Books
and Angry Robot US. Ten, or just over half of the
publishers on this list increased their output; nine
decreased it.
The percentage of reprints for
each major publisher can give an
indication of publishers’ profits.
Hard/soft deals and other variables
complicate matters, but it’s still
generally cheaper to do a reprint
than a new book. Graph 1: Publishing
History shows the relative numbers
between new books and reprints.
Reprint numbers came close to new
book numbers in 2000, but since
then reprints have fallen behind, and
this year the gap continued to widen,
larger than it’s been since we started
counting in 1972. The proportion
of reprints (the opposite of the
percentage of new books shown on
the Cumulative Book Survey) went
down to 30% from 31% last year.
Of the top ten SF publishers,
five increased their proportion of
reprints, four decreased theirs, and
one held steady, the same as last
year. Tor held steady with the highest percentage
of reprints, 60%; they continue to do most of
their titles as hardcover originals, with trade or
mass-market paperback reprints. All the rest of
the publishers had reprints as less than half of
their total. Harlequin trailed the rest with only 5%
reprints, down from 18% reprints; the bulk of their
titles are mass market originals, rarely reprinted,
or republished as part of omnibuses and therefore
counted as originals.
We saw genre material from 277 publishers, up
from 258 last year. We counted 225 miscellaneous
publishers, up from 200. We’re not certain how
many are POD publishers, since we can’t always
tell a book is POD, but we noted definite POD
books from 80 publishers; 47 of those had only
POD books.
The Chart of Total Books Published by SF
Imprint shows figures for the separate SF imprints,
apart from their companies’ non-specialty lines;
we list all imprints (including some small presses)
with ten or more titles. Imprints, dedicated to the
genre with editors who know the field, may better
represent the state of SF than the larger publishing
picture. Tor continues to dominate here, taking top
spot on the chart with 228 titles, more than twice
those of Ace with 96, returning in second place.
Baen held on in third with 75 titles. Roc moved up
three places into fourth with 67 titles, knocking Del
Rey back to fifth with 61, Orbit US to sixth with 56,
and DAW to seventh with 53. Subterranean held
onto eighth place with 52; below that the imprints
shuffled around as usual. New or returning to
the list are Tachyon Publications, Hades’ EDGE
Science Fiction and Fantasy. Harlequin Nocturne
is a revamp of the old Silhouette Nocturne line,
which wasn’t strictly a paranormal romance line
originally; we’re combining our figures for both
imprints for 2010 and 2009; Harper Voyager US
is a rename of Eos, and the older figures reflect
that. Dropping off the list are Firebird, Bad
Moon Books, Juno Books, CD Publications, and
Haikasoru.
QUaLITY
Our only fair criterion for judging quality
is the number of books that make the Locus
Recommended Reading List (pages 42-44) as
shown in Chart #4. We recommended 152 titles, up
from 148 last year. This year’s count includes five
novellas published as separate books. If a book had
an earlier or near-simultaneous UK edition as well
as the US one, we gave credit to both publishers.
� p. 77
LOCUS February 2012 / 55

2011 magazine summary
The publishing landscape continues to change
rapidly. Online and digital magazines are very
much coming into their own, with better fiction
offerings every year and more multi-media experiences,
podcasts, etc., but we are still seeing plenty
of print magazines and even growth for some. Big
changes for the year include Weird Tales under
new ownership, Realms of Fantasy closing once
again, Lightspeed and Fantasy changing publisher
and merging, several critical journals have had
problems with their printers, and more. Electronic
readerships are up across the board, and some of
the professional magazines have turned around
the slow dwindling of circulation.
We saw about the same number of issues for
2011, but 2012 will feel the loss of RoF unless
Weird Tales kicks in with the quarterly schedule
they plan. The total number of issues for professional
magazines was 37, down from 38 last year.
Smaller print magazines were mostly the same
with some showing growth. Online magazines
and podcasts have improved in quality, pay rate,
exposure, and influence. Several of the magazines
also published ‘‘Best of’’ anthologies both in print
and as e-books.
As mentioned last year, it’s getting harder to
accurately track numbers as publishing shifts to
digital and online, since traditionally we use the
Statement of Ownership to get subscriber numbers.
We have print plus digital circulation figures
for Analog, Asimov’s, and Locus and have
included the figures in those sections. The Dell
magazines’ total circulations have each gone up
although print circulation went down. The line
charts (p. 53) show both the print alone and the
total including digital numbers, which is why
there is a split at the end. We did not receive digital
circulation information from F&SF.
ANALOG
Analog had 19,302 print subscriptions and
4,100 digital subscriptions, for a total of 23,402
subscriptions, up from last year’s 22,791. Newsstand
sales were 2,941 and there were 150 digital
single units sold on average each month. Paid
circulation was just about flat (pretty good for a
print magazine these days), up 0.2%. Sell-through
was 30%. For the print circulation of both Analog
PROFESSIONAL MAGAZINES
ISSUES PUBLISHED (ALL FICTION ONLY)
TITLE 2011
Analog ........................................................ 10
Asimov’s SF ................................................ 10
F&SF ............................................................ 6
Interzone ....................................................... 6
Realms of Fantasy ......................................... 5
Total ............................................................. 37
TOTAL ISSUES
2011 5 fiction titles 37 issues
2010 5 fiction titles 37 issues
2009 5 fiction titles 39 issues
2008 5 fiction titles 43 issues
2007 5 fiction titles 43 issues
2006 5 fiction titles 43 issues
2005 6 fiction titles 45 issues
2004 6 fiction titles 44 issues
2003 5 fiction titles 47 issues
2002 5 fiction titles 49 issues
2001 5 fiction titles 51 issues
2000 7 fiction titles 58 issues
1999 7 fiction titles 61 issues
1998 8 fiction titles 63 issues
1997 7 fiction titles 59 issues
1996 6 fiction titles 58 issues
1995 6 fiction titles 61 issues
1994 8 fiction titles 61 issues
1993 7 fiction titles 71 issues
56 / LOCUS February 2012
2011 Magazine Circulation Summary
Subscrip- Digital Newsstand % Newsstand Paid Paid Circ.
Year tions Sales Sales Returns Copies Sold Circulation Change
Analog
1995 61,000 9,000 19,400 32% 70,000 -6.7%
1996 52,563 7,086 17,140 29% 59,648 -14.8%
1997 46,324 7,048 14,754 32% 53,372 -10.5%
1998 46,707 12,950 12,422 51% 59,657 +11.8%
1999 40,731 10,932 16,093 41% 51,663 -13.4%
2000 39,270 8,497 17,137 33% 47,767 -7.5%
2001 34,811 8,318 8,950 48% 43,129 -9.7%
2002 33,307 8,808 7,164 55% 42,115 -2.4%
2003 31,715 8,883 5,729 61% 40,598 -3.6%
2004 27,816 5,456 5,532 50% 33,272 -18.0%
2005 25,933 4,614 10,776 30% 30,547 -8.2%
2006 23,732 4,587 9,943 32% 28,319 -7.3%
2007 22,972 4,427 8,672 34% 27,399 -3.2%
2008 21,880 4,119 7,995 34% 25,999 -5.1%
2009 21,636 3,782 7,494 34% 25,418 -2.2%
2010 22,791 * 290 3,359 7,276 32% 26,440 * +4.0%
2011 23,402 * 150 2,941 6,862 30% 26,493 * +0.2%
Asimov’s Science Fiction
1995 52,000 7,000 17,000 29% 59,000 -14.5%
1996 41,230 4,679 13,134 26% 45,909 -22.2%
1997 37,488 5,040 12,151 29% 42,568 -7.4%
1998 35,273 11,982 11,094 52% 47,255 +11.0%
1999 29,265 6,606 16,173 29% 35,871 -24.1%
2000 25,917 5,544 16,091 26% 31,461 -12.3%
2001 23,727 8,658 8,510 50% 32,385 +2.9%
2002 24,231 7,600 6,001 56% 31,831 -1.7%
2003 22,933 7,668 5,088 60% 30,601 -3.9%
2004 23,928 3,936 7,564 34% 27,864 -8.9%
2005 18,050 3,397 8,181 29% 21,447 -23.0%
2006 15,117 3,419 8,394 29% 18,536 -13.6%
2007 14,084 3,497 8,002 30% 17,581 -5.2%
2008 13,842 3,260 7,256 31% 17,102 -2.7%
2009 13,731 2,965 6,691 31% 16,696 -2.4%
2010 17,866 * 410 2,781 6,161 31% 21,057 * +26.1%
2011 19,969 * 290 2,334 6,001 28% 22,593 * +7.3%
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
1995 43,903 7,754 9,735 44% 51,557 -0.4%
1996 38,442 7,144 10,186 41% 45,586 -11.6%
1997 31,703 7,953 8,857 47% 39,656 -13.0%
1998 27,310 7,458 12,744 37% 34,768 -12.3%
1999 26,909 5,716 9,318 38% 32,625 -6.3%
2000 25,615 4,356 9,814 31% 29,971 -8.1%
2001 22,316 4,168 9,940 30% 26,484 -11.6%
2002 19,278 4,542 7,609 37% 23,820 -10.1%
2003 16,562 4,881 6,239 44% 21,443 -10.0%
2004 15,033 3,886 5,799 40% 18,919 -11.8%
2005 14,918 3,822 6,477 ° 37% ° 18,740 -1.0%
4000
2000
0
2006 14,575 3,691 10,173 27% 18,566 -0.9%
2007 12,831 3,658 7,444 33% 16,489 -11.2%
2008 12,374 3,670 6,560 36% 16,044 -2.7%
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
New Books
2009 12,045 3,446 5,780 37% 15,491 -3.4%
2010 10,907 4,265 4,853 42% 15,172 -2.1%
2011 10,539 3,923 6,584 38% 14,462 -4.7%
1995 5,073 3,172
Locus
348 90% 8,245 +2.4%
1996 4,998 3,081 449 87% 8,079 -2.0%
1997 4,898 3,097 744 81% 7,985 -1.2%
1998 4,877 2,793 956 74% 7,670 -3.9%
1999 4,825 2,636 926 74% 7,461 -2.7%
2000 4,735 2,466 1,229 67% 7,201 -3.5%
2001 4,788 2,551 1,298 66% 7,339 +1.9%
2002 4,798 2,189 1,467 60% 6,987 -5.8%
2003 4,792 2,339 1,527 61% 7,131 +2.1%
2004 4,623 2,173 1,551 58% 6,796 -4.7%
2005 4,570 1,913 1,514 56% 6,483 -4.6%
2006 4,495 1,779 1,582 53% 6,274 -3.2%
2007 4,110 1,971 1,356 59% 6,081 -3.1%
2008 4,270 1,422 1,357 51% 5,692 -6.4%
2009 4,081 1,100 1,587 41% 5,181 -9.0%
2010 3,755 982 1,434 41% 4,737 -8.6%
2011 3,524 * 36 1,038 1,390 43% 4,598 * -2.9%
*Includes digital sales information
°In 2005, the last month’s number was used, not the yearly average. Current chart is correct.

and Asimov’s, we get corrected numbers from the
Dell offices; they calculate the numbers on their
printed statements of ownership differently than
the other magazines. We’re also including digital
subscriptions as reported by the company in our
total subscriber numbers.
Analog produced ten tall, digest-size issues with
112 pages for the regular issues and 192 for the
doubles in January/February and July/August. The
cover price held at $4.99 for single issues and $7.99
for doubles. There were three serials, six novellas,
23 novelettes, 36 short stories, and six ‘‘Probability
Zero’’ pieces, for a total of 74 pieces of fiction
(down from last year’s 75), plus one poem. Covers
were of fine and consistent quality, and included
spacescapes, domed cities, aliens, ships, and one
fleeing marine extraterrestrial. Editor is Stanley
Schmidt; Trevor Quachri is managing editor.
ASIMOV’s
Asimov’s had 12,469 print subscriptions and
7,500 digital subscriptions for a total of 19,969,
up from 17,866 last year. Newsstand sales were
2,334, plus 290 digital copies sold on average each
month in 2011, for a jump of about 7.3% in total
paid circulation. Sell-through was 28%.
Asimov’s produced ten tall, digest-size issues,
with 112 pages for regular issues and 192 for the
doubles in April/May and October/November.
There were six novellas, 24 novelettes, and 48
short stories, for 78 pieces of fiction, plus 31
poems. Covers were excellent and included space-
and marinescapes, crashed spaceships, robots and
androids, and one steampunk-themed train with
requisite parasol-toting passenger.
Editor Sheila Williams noted, ‘‘We published
lots of wonderful stories by people like (but not
limited to) Connie Willis, Kristine Kathryn
Rusch, Kij Johnson, Robert Silverberg, Mary
Robinette Kowal, Ian R. MacLeod, Paul McAluley,
Paul Cornell, and Melanie Tem. Digital editions
also became available on more platforms
including the iPad – via Zinio – and the Kindle
Fire. Business in that area is continuing to grow
at a healthy and exciting pace.’’ Trevor Quachri
is managing editor.
F&SF
F&SF’s paid print circulation dropped 4.7%
with 3,923 copies sold on newsstands and subscriber
numbers mostly flat. Sell-through was
down slightly to 38%, from last year’s 42%. In
addition to the print editions, F&SF has been
available electronically for a few years, though as
of this year is distributed exclusively by Amazon.
No digital figures were available, though publisher
and editor Gordon Van Gelder said, ‘‘our
electronic sales… were strong in our first year on
the Kindle.’’
F&SF produced six digest-size double issues
with 258 pages, each priced at $7.50. The year saw
five novellas, 20 novelettes, and 37 short stories
for a total of 62 pieces of fiction (down from last
year’s 65), plus one poem. Covers were good
quality and included a mountaintop spaceship
landing, a domed city on a red planet, and a very
large and ominous egg.
INTERZONE/BLACK STATIC
Interzone from TTA Press in the UK had six
full-size bimonthly issues. (Not a professional
magazine – more of a semi-professional – it has
been grandfathered into this section of our report.)
Issues ran 64 pages and the price was ‘‘still only
£3.95.’’ There were 28 pieces of fiction, down
from last year’s 32, plus news, book and film reviews,
and author interviews. Covers were mostly
gorgeous, tending toward landscape vignettes
with alien invasions, mysterious starfields, giant
robots, etc., and were all full color on quality slick
paper. Andy Cox and Andy Hedgecock are the
fiction editors. We assume circulation remains
around 2,000-3,000, but we haven’t seen real
numbers about the magazine since Dave Pringle
was publisher.
There were six full-size issues of Black Static
also from TTA Press; we only saw five here.
Their striking dark covers were semi-glossy with
strong typographical elements and distressed images
of faces and figures; interiors were full-color
and handsomely laid out. Issues ran 64 pages
and published 30 pieces of fiction. Andy Cox was
editor, with Peter Tennant, Tony Lee, Christopher
Fowler, Stephen Volk, and Mike O’Driscoll
listed as contributing editors. Biweekly podcast
Transmissions from Beyond, which had been
presenting stories from Interzone, Black Static,
and sister magazine Crimewave, stopped transmitting
in March 2011.
REALMS OF FANTASY
Realms of Fantasy folded at the end of 2011.
RoF was acquired in late 2010 by Kim Richards-
Gilchrist & William Gilchrist of Damnation
Books, having been taken over from Sovereign
Media in 2009 by Warren Lapine of Tir Na Nog
Publications. In November of 2011, the Gilchrists
announced that they would be closing the magazine:
‘‘When we purchased Realms of Fantasy
last year we truly thought that we could succeed in
publishing the magazine for the foreseeable future.
We were unable to realize this goal, have been losing
money, and we must regretfully announce the
closure of the magazine.’’ In a more recent note to
us, Kim said, ‘‘I’m saddened to let go of Realms
of Fantasy.... It’s been enjoyable for us. It just cost
so much more to publish than it brought in and
we could only personally finance it for this long.
Going all electronic wouldn’t work without losing
half the remaining subscribers (prison facilities,
doctor and hospitals for waiting rooms, places
where electronic isn’t viable) and reducing pay
rates. We decided it was better to let it go as is.’’
The five issues they did produce ranged from
80-100 pages. Issues were full size with glossy
color throughout. Cover price was $6.99 for print
until dropping to $5.99 for August and October
(the final); PDFs were $3.99. There were 27 pieces
of fiction, with special issues including the April
dark fantasy issue, and the 100th issue in June.
Covers included various dark winged figures, a
gossamer maiden, and a barefoot hearth-wench.
Shawna McCarthy was fiction editor; Douglas
Cohen was editor.
Kim Gilchrist reported that final subscriber
numbers were 5,967 with about 2,000 in print
sales. We’ve pulled the magazine from the chart
since we don’t have comparable average numbers
to run for 2011, and it looks like this closure may
stick. Space and Time Magazine has taken the
now defunct magazine’s subscriber list, and have
agreed to provide subscribers with a complimentary
back issue of Space and Time.
LOCUS
Our perennial disclaimer: Locus is not a fiction
magazine, doesn’t qualify as ‘‘professional’’ – i.e.
having a circulation over 10,000, which eliminates
Interzone as well – and doesn’t entirely belong in
this category. But since we have a periodical-class
postage permit and publish circulation figures, we
include them here.
Our paid circulation dropped 2.9% with a 43%
newsstand sell-through rate; circulation is still
down but much improved from last year’s drop
of 8.6%. We produced 12 monthly issues rang-
PRINT CIRCULATION
NEWSSTAND SALES
– – – SUBSCRIPTIONS
PRINT & DIGITAL CIRCULATION
NEWSSTAND & SINGLE-ISSUE DIGITAL
– – – SUBSCRIPTIONS & DIGITAL SUBS
ing from 64-88 pages, with a glossy cover around
book print and an occasional color section in the
center. The cover price remained $6.95. In January
we launched our full-color digital issues with
epub, Kindle, and PDF editions, priced at $5.50,
and the digital editions have had an excellent
reception. We plan to continue to provide international-rate
subscribers with complimentary
digital editions along with their print copies, at
least for 2012.
In January 2011, ownership of the magazine
was officially transferred from the Charles N.
�
LOCUS February 2012 / 57

� 2011 Magazine Summary
Brown Trust to the Locus SF Foundation, Inc., a
501(c)3 nonprofit. Plans for 2012 include an art
issue and a young-adult special issue. Liza Groen
Trombi is editor-in-chief, and Kirsten Gong-
Wong is managing editor.
SEMI-PROFESSIONaL MaGaZINES
Semi-professional magazines are defined here
as fiction magazines with bookstore sales but no
national newsstand distribution. Circulation is
under 10,000, but they are otherwise professional:
they have color covers, publish mainly fiction,
pay at least two cents per word on acceptance,
and appear at least quarterly (this is the kicker;
we often see quarterlies that only manage one or
two issues). We saw no print magazines that met
the qualifications this year.
aLMOSTS
The following magazines are missing one of
the semi-professional requirements: producing
fewer than four issues mostly, but some were
short on the pay scale.
Weird Tales put out two issues, #357 and #358,
for Spring and Summer. Issue #359 is complete but
was not published. Page count was 80 pages. There
were 13 pieces of fiction, up from 12, and two poems.
Covers were glossy color with vibrant images
of surrealistic women, while interiors were b&w.
The price stayed at $6.99. Subscriptions were
around 1,600 with a total paid circulation ‘‘a tad
over 2,400.’’ Ann VanderMeer was editor-in-chief,
and John Gregory Betancourt was publisher. It was
announced in August 2011 that Marvin Kaye and
actor/director John Harlacher were acquiring the
magazine – long-time editor, anthologist, and author
Kaye plans to edit the magazine himself. Kaye
and Harlacher noted plans to have Ann continue
working with the magazine, selecting at least one
new story for each issue as senior contributing editor.
Kaye says he wants to honor the history of the
magazine, and that starting February 2012 each
issue will be themed, and ‘‘the usual assortment of
stories and poetry will be included along with tales
that fit the governing conceit,’’ including absurdist
humor, fantasy, horror, mystery, and surrealism.
We saw only three issues of Canadian quarterly
digest On Spec. Colors are semi-gloss with simple
but elegant fantasy images, the most recent a handsome
cover by James Ng, a steampunk depiction
of an Asian automaton pair in rich hues of red and
brown. Issues were perfect-bound with 112 to 140
pages containing a total of 24 pieces of prose fiction
and seven poems (compared to last year’s six).
Cover price remained CA$6.95. Print runs went
up to around 1,000, with 424 print subscribers and
37 digital subs, 160 in newsstand sales, and 37%
sell-through, with others selling at or donated to
events, according to publisher’s assistant Jen Laface.
Diane L. Walton was managing editor, and
The Copper Pig Writers’ Society was publisher.
Australian Andromeda Spaceways Inflight
Magazine produced four perfect-bound issues with
color covers, ranging from playful illustration to
clunky digital images, and b&w interiors, each
between 164-170 pages, with a total of 58 pieces
of fiction. The price increased from AU$8.95 to
AU$12.95 with issue number 51. Editor-in-chief
is Robbie Matthews; editor changes each issue.
Tales of the Talisman published four issues,
perfect-bound with glossy color covers and black
and white interiors, from 94-112 pages, with a
total of 50 short stories and 47 poems. The print
run averaged around 175 and subscriber base was
100. The additional 75 copies were sold online and
at convention vendor tables. Subscription rates
58 / LOCUS February 2012
remained steady in 2011.
Electric Velocipede published two issues in
2011, its tenth year of publication. The first, a
double issue for $12.00 was planned for Fall 2010
but came out in summer of 2011, and was 216
pages with a color cover and b&w interior. This
was their final print issue as they transitioned to
online only with Winter 2011, #23, which is free.
They published three novelettes, 24 short stories,
ten poems, and eight non-fiction pieces. The
magazine formally ended their partnership with
Night Shade Books in 2011, and that, combined
with a move by the editor, slowed production
down. Plans for 2012 include getting firmly onto
a quarterly schedule.
Icarus, a full-size mag, full-color throughout
from Lethe Press, specializing in gay speculative
fiction, released four issues of 52 pages each, with
short stories, poetry, reviews, non-fiction articles,
and interviews for $13.00 per issue; PDF issues are
also available for $6.99. If nothing has changed
since last year, there were around 75 subscriptions
and 50 copies sold through bookstores.
OTHERS
There was only one issue of ’zine Lady
Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, from editors Gavin
Grant & Kelly Link, with nine pieces of fiction
by a good roster of authors and 10 poems. There
are 300 print subscriptions and 100 electronic;
the title is now available electronically via .
Shimmer produced two issues, with glossy color
covers and perfect binding, 96 and 104 pages, with
20 stories in total. Editor Beth Wodzinski says,
‘‘We’re looking forward to three issues in 2012,
as we continue to improve our workflow. We’re
also looking forward to offering more electronic
versions and appearing in more marketplaces.’’
Quarterly Space and Time Magazine produced
three 48-page, full-size issues in 2011; two were
dated Spring 2011 – issues #113 and #114 (actually
Summer) – and Fall 2011 was #115. Issues are
b&w with color covers. Print runs ranged between
1,000 and 1,500 per issue, and subscription base
increased to about 150, including electronic subscriptions.
Issues were $5.00; they published 27
short stories and 24 poems. They also developed
their first .mobi editions which they plan to sell
through Weightless Books in 2012, and plan a
site revamp to refresh the design. Publisher Hildy
Silverman says they send about 400 copies out to
newsstands and stores.
Science Fiction Trails, ‘‘where science meets
the Wild West,’’ published two issues in 2011 at
79 and 93 pages, changing format from 8 in. x 10
in. to 8.5 in. x 11 in. with issue #7. Price was $7.75,
and they ran 18 stories.
Cemetery Dance put out one 144-page issue
in 2011 with 10 stories and a glossy color cover
featuring a monster warrior surrounded by birds.
Print run was 10,000, with 5,000 subscribers;
cover price was $6.00.
UK publication Jupiter produced four chapbook-size,
b&w issues with 21 pieces of fiction and
six poems, 56 pages each. Ian Redman was editor.
We saw two issues of Dark Discoveries, 64
pages each on glossy paper with color covers and
mostly b&w interior. There were 10 pieces of
fiction and one poem, plus author interviews and
other non-fiction. Circulation was 1,600-2,500 per
issue, with about 45% sell-through, which is just
about where it should be; there were 400 subscribers.
James R. Beach is publisher/editor-in-chief,
and Jason V Brock is art director/managing editor.
In 2012, plans are to launch an animated digital
companion, digital subscriptions, and a ‘‘Best
of’’ anthology.
There were three issues of Nova Science Fiction
at 56 pages, with 16 pieces of fiction.
We saw three issues of full-size Bull Spec – #4,
#5, and #6 – running 62-66 pages, one a latecomer
from 2010. There were 18 stories, three graphic
shorts, and 15 poems. Covers were charming and
steampunkish, with glossy b&w interiors and one
center spot color. According to publisher Samuel
Montgomery-Blinn, print run is 550, and PDF
readership is steady at 550-750 downloads per issue.
Changes for 2012 include new fiction editors
Natania Barron and Eric Gregory, and, according
to Sam, ‘‘to really push this year to establish Bull
Spec as a self-sustaining magazine that makes the
transition from ‘lone fool founder doing editing,
publishing, and designing’ to a real team effort.’’
We saw one issue of Black Gate, which is now
published at the new ‘‘double-issue’’ size, with 384
pages. The cover price was increased to $18.95,
and there were 22 pieces of fiction, including one
novel excerpt. The publisher is John O’Neill;
Howard Andrew Jones is managing editor. They
plan to shift to digital only in 2012, printing paper
editions only when demand is high enough.
We also saw a single issue of Neo-Opsis edited
by Karl Johanson. In poetry, we received two
issues of chapbook-style poetry ’zine Mythic
Delirium, #24 and #25 priced at $5.00 with 40
poems total; three issues of Star*Line; three issues
of Dreams and Nightmares priced at $5.00 with
42 poems; plus one issue of Dwarf Stars 2010 and
The Magazine of Speculative Poetry.
ONLINE MaGaZINES
Online magazines continue to grow and improve.
We are seeing more quality fiction, high
mixed media appeal, and better paying markets
online than ever before.
Clarkesworld, ,
published 12 issues with 25 stories, one a threeissue
serial, as well as a podcast of each story,
non-fiction, and reviews. According to editor Neil
Clarke, the website attracts 23,000 unique visitors
per month, along with 6,000 listeners, and 900
subscribers via Kindle/Weightless Books PDF
subscriptions. At the end of 2011, Cheryl Morgan
stepped down as non-fiction editor after a two-year
stint; Jason Heller took up that role starting January
2012. Sean Wallace returned to his previous
position as one of the fiction editors.
Fantasy Magazine, , published 12 scheduled issues with 48
stories (28 original, 20 reprint), plus author interviews
and spotlights, and had an average 31,200
visitors per month, 250 e-copies sold, and 100
subscriptions. Staff changed, with publisher Sean
Wallace stepping down, and John Joseph Adams
taking over as of December 2011. In January 2012,
Fantasy merged into Lightspeed, with plans to
publish the same quantity of fiction as was previously
in the two magazines.
Lightspeed Magazine, ,
produced 12 issues with 48 stories
(24 original, 24 reprint), had an average 22,500
visitors per month, 800 e-copies sold, and 200
subscriptions. Because of the merge with Fantasy,
in 2012 there will be less non-fiction and the price
of e-issues increased to $3.99.
Website Tor.com published 30 original stories,
all with original artwork, and over ten short story
reprints. According to art director Irene Gallo,
‘‘traffic has doubled in the past 18 months and has
been accelerating.’’ They also recently launched
a mobile version.
Strange Horizons, , produced 51 issues with 35 stories (31
new and four reprints), plus poetry, columns,
articles, reviews, and other content. Karen Meis-

ner stepped down as fiction editor; fiction editors
Jed Hartman and Susan Marie Groppi remain.
According to editor-in-chief, Niall Harrison,
‘‘traffic was up about 5% compared to 2010’’ and
‘‘six stories from 2010 were picked up for Year’s
Best anthologies.’’
Subterranean, , put out four issues containing
26 stories. Publisher Bill Schafer mentioned ‘‘A
Small Price to Pay for Birdsong’’ by K.J. Parker
‘‘drew a bit of notice.’’
Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine
Show, ,
published 28 stories in five issues, plus three
audio stories, as well as interviews and artwork.
Edmund R. Schubert is editor.
Apex, ,
published 24 new stories and 12 reprints,
plus poetry in 12 issues; according to publisher
Jason Sizemore, the site received approximately
120,000 visits in 2011, and the magazine has 400
digital subscribers (through Kindle and Weightless
Books) and sells 100-200 single issue copies
a month. Catherynne M. Valente stepped down as
editor-in-chief, replaced by Lynne M. Thomas.
Abyss & Apex Magazine, ,
published 25 original stories and one
reprint in four quarterly issues, with 56% coming
from female writers, 44% from male. Editor and
publisher Wendy S. Delmater said, ‘‘There were
12 science fiction and 13 fantasy tales so we were
close to our 50/50 ideal subgenre ratio.’’ There
were also reviews of small-press books, editorials,
and poetry. A new URL accompanied a site
redesign, and staff changes included new science
fiction editor Bonnie Freeman, flash editor Jennifer
Dawson, and poetry editor Sephen M. Wilson,
as well as a new position, fantasy editor, held by
Miachel G. Holmes.
Zahir, , ended its run after it
published 26 stories (originals and reprints) in four
issues in 2011, and an anthology of those stories.
Flurb, , published 26 stories in
2011 in two issues, March and September. Each
#253 (1982) - $4.95
#265 (1983) - *
#277 (1984) - *
#289 (1985) - $4.95
#301 (1986) - $4.95
#313 (1987) - *
#325 (1988) - $4.95
#337 (1989) - *
#349 (1990) - *
#361 (1991) - $4.95
issue gets about 60,000 visitors. Flurb is edited
and published by Rudy Rucker, though issue #11
was guest-edited by Eileen Gunn, who ‘‘brought
in three Mexican SF writers, whose stories we
published in both English and Spanish.’’
M-Brane, , produced 5
issues with 27 original stories. The magazine went
on hiatus as of November 21, 2011.
Electric Spec, ,
published four quarterly issues with a total of
20 stories, and a gets about a thousand hits per
month, with 600 unique visitors. According
to editor Betsy Dornbusch, ‘‘Our submissions
continue to rise, enough that we’re looking into
bringing in a couple of slush readers, but we have
no other changes planned for 2012, which will be
our 7th year.’’
Daily Science Fiction, , is a relatively new magazine, which sends
a new short piece of fiction to subscribers via
e-mail every weekday (longer pieces on Friday),
then publishes the stories a week later on their
website. They published 260 original stories in
2011. According to editor Jonathan Laden, ‘‘we
almost tripled our readership in the course of a
year’’ going from about 1,200 subscribers to over
3,400, plus an additional 15,000 or so website
visits per month. Plans include publishing an
anthology of stories from the first year.
Podcasts, while not magazines or anthologies
or collections, are a valuable addition to the field,
providing new paying markets and excellent
exposure for short fiction. Major player, Escape
Artists Inc., reported circulation as follows:
science fiction podcast Escape Pod averages
27,000 downloads per episode; fantasy podcast
PodCastle averages 12,000, and horror podcast
Psuedopod averages 15,000. Escape Artists
launched three exclusive audio collections for
listeners who support the shows financially and
plan more for 2012.
Escape Pod, , produced 51
episodes, generally with one story per episode.
Editor Mur Lafferty reported the sum total of
downloads of all stories was 1.5 million for 2011.
Late 2010 they launched Soundproof, a companion
PDF of the stories, which averaged 60,000
downloads each in 2011. According to Lafferty,
‘‘Plans for 2012 include tweaking what we pay
authors (more).’’
Podcastle, , produced 51
episodes, generally with one story per episode,
with ‘‘The Surgeon’s Tale’’ by Cat Rambo & Jeff
VanderMeer being the most downloaded at 16,500
hits. The venue published mostly reprints, but included
three original stories in the past year. They
have started doing PodCastle Spotlights, ‘‘where
we invited authors we’d published at PodCastle to
talk about their newly released books.’’
Pseudopod, , produced
42 episodes with generally one story per episode.
There was a two-month hiatus in early 2011 due
to a change in editor. New editor Shawn Garrett
says, ‘‘2012 is shaping up to be a wild ride’’ with
a strong roster of authors, and will include adding
in ‘‘some minor sound and music production.’’
The Agony Column, , is
a weekly podcast hosted by Rick Kleffel and
broadcast on local NPR station KUSP 88.9 in
California, featuring interviews, readings, and
commentary about science fiction, mystery, and
other subjects. The Agony Column podcasts
recordings made at the live ‘‘SF in SF’’ shows in
San Francisco, each featuring two authors reading
their work, a panel discussion with host Terry
Bisson, and an interview with Kleffel.
Non-fiction interview and review podcast
Dragon Page Cover to Cover, , produced 35 episodes with about 100,000
downloads for the year, or 3,200 per episode, according
to executive producer Summer Brooks.
Other online magazines and podcasts of note
(for more info also see Rich Horton and Gardner
Dozois’s year-end columns, and the Links section
of Locus Online) include Hub, Ideomancer, Futurismic,
ChiZine, Chiaroscuro, Heroic Fantasy
Quarterly, Cabinet des Fees, Redstone Science
� p. 78
Have You Missed These Earlier
Locus Recommended Lists & Poll Results?
Recommended Reading/Year in Review:
#373 (1992) - $4.95
#385 (1993) - $4.95
#397 (1994) - $4.95
#409 (1995) - *
#421 (1996) - $4.95
#433 (1997) - $4.95
#445 (1998) - $4.95
#457 (1999) - $4.95
#469 (2000) - $4.95
#481 (2001) - $4.95
#493 (2002) - $4.95
#505 (2003) - $5.95
#517 (2004) - $5.95
#529 (2005) - $5.95
#541 (2006) - $6.50
#553 (2007) - $6.95
#565 (2008) - $6.95
#577 (2009) - $6.95
#589 (2010) - $6.95
#601 (2011) - $6.95
#258 (1982) - $4.95
#270 (1983) - $4.95
#282 (1984) - $4.95
#293 (1985) - $4.95
#305 (1986) - $4.95
#318 (1987) - *
#332 (1988) - $4.95
#343 (1989) - $4.95
#355 (1990) - $4.95
#366 (1991) - $4.95
Locus Awards/Poll Results:
#379 (1992) - $4.95
#391 (1993) - $4.95
#403 (1994) - $4.95
#415 (1995) - $4.95
#427 (1996) - $4.95
#439 (1997) - $4.95
#451 (1998) - $4.95
#463 (1999) - $4.95
#475 (2000) - $4.95
#487 (2001) - $4.95
*Issue is sold out; however, photocopy of relevant pages available for $4.95.
Please note: Each year’s Recommended List and Awards/Poll results cover the preceding year in SF.
Some quantities are limited; if issue is sold out, we will send photocopies of relevant pages.
Postage: for 1 copy, add $3.00 postage; for 2-7 copies, $3.00 plus $1.00 for each additional copy; 8 copies or more, $10.00 flat rate.
International postage: request total. All overseas copies will be sent Economy Rate.
Order from Locus, PO Box 13305, Oakland CA 94661; (510) 339-9196; fax (510) 339-9198; e-mail .
#499 (2002) - $4.95
#511 (2003) - $5.95
#522 (2004) - $5.95
#534 (2005) - $5.95
#546 (2006) - $6.50
#558 (2007) - $6.95
#570 (2008) - $6.95
#582 (2009) - $6.95
#594 (2010) - $6.95
#606 (2011) - $6.95
LOCUS February 2012 / 59

Analog Science Fiction and Fact–
Stanley Schmidt, ed. Vol. 132 No. 3,
March 2012, $4.99, 10 times a year,
112pp, 15 x 22 cm. Part two of a
four-part serial by Robert J. Sawyer;
novelettes by Craig DeLancey and
Kyle Kirkland; short stories by Richard
A. Lovett and Alec Nevala-Lee; a
science article by Adrian L. Melott; reviews,
etc. Cover by Tomislav Tikulin.
Analog Science Fiction and Fact–
Stanley Schmidt, ed. Vol. 132 No. 4,
April 2012, $4.99, 10 times a year,
112pp, 15 x 22 cm. Part three of a
four-part serial by Robert J. Sawyer;
novelettes by Susan Forest and Craig
DeLancey; short stories by Kevin J.
Anderson, Jerry Oltion, and Stephen
L. Burns; a science article by Richard
A. Lovett; reviews, etc. Cover by
David A. Hardy.
Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine–David
Kernot, ed., Vol 9 No. 4,
#52, September 2011, A$12.95, quarterly,
172pp, 15 x 21 cm. Australian SF
and fantasy small-press magazine.
This issue includes 19 pieces of short
fiction; an article on Hergé and the
Hugos; poetry; and reviews. Cover
by Olivia Kernot. Subscription: oneyear
A$48.00/Overseas A$68.00 to
Andromeda Spaceways Publishing,
c/o Simon Petrie, PO Box 7311,
Kaleen ACT 2617, Australia; e-mail:

Compiled by Liza Groen Trombi &
Carolyn Cushman. Please send all
corrections to Carolyn Cushman c/o
Locus. We will run all verified corrections.
KEY: * = first edition + = first American
edition.
* Alexander, Alma, ed. River (Dark
Quest Books 978-1-937051-23-5,
$14.95, 171pp, tp, cover by Nathie)
Original anthology of 13 stories
involving rivers. Authors include
Nisi Shawl, Seanan McGuire, and
Jay Lake. A print-on-demand edition.
Dark Quest Books, 23 Alec
Drive, Howell NJ 07731; .
* Andersen, Jessica Lord of the
Wolfyn & Twin Targets (Harlequin/
Nocturne 978-0-373-83774-8, $6.99,
459pp, pb) Omnibus of two romance
novels: paranormal romance Lord
of the Wolfyn (2011), the third book
in the multi-author Royal House of
Shadows series; and thriller Twin
Targets (2008).
* Andrews, Ilona Fate’s Edge (Ace
978-0-441-02086-7, $7.99, 372pp,
pb, cover by Victoria Vebell) Fantasy
novel, the third book in the Edge series.
Kaldar Mar searches for a stolen
item and gets involved with an Edger
woman from a family of con men.
Ilona Andrews is a pen name for the
husband-wife writing team Andrew &
Ilona Gordon.
* Anonymous, ed. Forgotten
Realms: Ed Greenwood Presents
Waterdeep, Book II (Wizards of the
Coast 978-0-7869-5851-1, $15.95,
757pp, tp, cover by Android Jones)
Omnibus of three gaming tie-in novels
in the Ed Greenwood Presents
Waterdeep series: City of the Dead
by Rosemary Jones (2009), The God
Catcher by Erin M. Evans (2010), and
Circle of Skulls by James P. Davis
(2010). Copyrighted by Wizards of
the Coast.
* Archer, Zoe Devil’s Kiss
(Kensington/Zebra 978-1-4201-2227-
5, $6.99, 355pp, pb) Paranormal
historical romance novel, the first
book in the Hellraisers trilogy.
* Asher, Jay & Carolyn Mackler The
Future of Us (Penguin/Razorbill
978-1-59514-491-1, $18.99, 356pp,
hc) Young-adult quasi-SF novel. Josh
and Emma go online in 1996 and find
their Facebook pages from 2011.
Books Received - December
* Ashgrove, Claire Immortal Hope
(Tor 978-0-7653-6758-7, $7.99,
355pp, pb, cover by Scott Grimando)
Paranormal romance, the first book
in a series about cursed Templar
knights still walking the Earth.
Asprin, Robert & Jody Lynn Nye
Myth-Fortunes (Ace 978-1-937007-
07-2, $7.99, 277pp, pb, cover by
Walter Velez) Reprint (Wildside
Press 2008, not seen) fantasy novel
in Asprin’s Myth Adventures series.
Afterword by Nye.
* Bagg, Roger Expedition Beyond
(Fiction Studio Books 978-1-936558-
22-3, $26.95, 405pp, hc, cover by
Paul Youll) Hollow-Earth SF novel.
* Baker, Kage Ancient Rockets:
Treasures and Trainwrecks of the
Silent Screen (Tachyon Publications
978-1-61696-074-2, $14.95, 201pp,
tp) Associational non-fiction, a collection
of essays on the first silent SF and
fantasy movies. Essays were originally
published on Tor.com. Introduction
by Kathleen Bartholomew. Tachyon
Publications, 1459 18th Street #139,
San Francisco CA 94107; .
* Bear, Greg Halo: Primordium
(Tor 978-0-7653-2397-2, $25.99,
379pp, hc, cover by Sparth) Gaming
tie-in novel, the second book in the
Forerunner Saga trilogy, looking at
the early days of the Halo universe.
Copyrighted by Microsoft.
* Benulis, Sabrina Archon (Harper
Voyager US 978-0-06-206940-5,
$22.99, 385pp, hc, cover by Borja
Fresco Costa) Urban fantasy novel,
the first in the Books of Raziel series.
Angela Mathers’s visions of an angel
land her in the middle of the war between
Heaven and Hell. A first novel.
* Berne, Emma Carlson Still Waters
(Simon Pulse 978-1-4424-2114-1,
$9.99, 212pp, tp) Young-adult horror
novel. Hannah’s boyfriend starts
acting strange when they spend a
weekend at an old lake house.
* Blackwell, Juliet Dead Bolt
(Penguin/Obsidian 978-0-
451-23530-5, $7.99, 315pp, pb)
Paranormal mystery novel, second
in the Haunted Home Renovation series.
Blackwell is a pen name for Julie
Goodson-Lawes, who also writes as
half of Hailey Lind.
* Bligh, Alan Arkham Horror: Dance
of the Damned (Fantasy Flight
Publishing 978-1-58994-970-6,
$8.99, 324pp, pb, cover by Anders
Finér) Gaming tie-in novel based on
the game inspired by the work of H.P.
Lovecraft, the first book in the Lord of
Nightmares trilogy. Copyrighted by
Fantasy Flight Publishing.
* Bonilla, Amanda Shaedes of Gray
(Penguin/Signet Eclipse 978-0-451-
23529-9, $7.99, 316pp, pb) Urban
fantasy/paranormal romance novel,
the first book in the Shaede Assassin
series. Darian, an immortal Shaede
assassin, believes she’s the last of
her kind until ordered to kill the king
of the Shaede Nation. A first novel.
* Book Wish Foundation, ed. What
You Wish For: A Book for Darfur
(Penguin/Putnam 978-0-399-25454-
3, $17.99, 266pp, hc) Young-adult
original anthology of 18 pieces about
wishes: 12 stories, five poems, and
a graphic story. Published to benefit
Darfuri refugees. Foreword by Mia
Farrow. Authors include Cornelia
Funke, Joyce Carol Oates, R.L. Stine,
and Jane Yolen.
* Boudinot, Ryan Blueprints of the
Afterlife (Grove/Atlantic/Black Cat
978-0-8021-7091-0, $14.00, 427pp,
tp) Satiric SF novel set in a future
where the boundaries between nature,
humanity, and technology are
no longer distinguishable.
* Bova, Ben Power Play (Tor 978-
0-763-1786-5, $24.99, 352pp, hc)
Associational political thriller. A
university astronomer is recruited to
help a politician promote magnetohyrdrodynamics
as a power source.
* Bowden, Oliver Assassin’s Creed:
Revelations (Ace 978-1-937007-42-
3, $9.99, 504pp, pb) Tie-in novel,
the fourth in a series based on
the historical fantasy/SF computer
game. This is a premium/tall racksize
edition. Copyrighted by Ubisoft
Entertainment.
Brackett, Leigh The Big Jump (Arc
Manor/Phoenix Pick 978-1-61242-
053-0, $6.99, 135pp, tp) Reprint (Ace
1955 as part of an Ace Double) SF
novel. A print-on-demand edition. Arc
Manor, PO Box 10339, Rockville MD
20849-0339; .
* Breaux, Kevin James Blood
Divided (Dark Quest Books 978-
1-937051-24-2, $14.95, 300pp, tp,
cover by Dan Dos Santos) Fantasy
novel, the second book in the Soul
Born Saga series. A print-on-demand
edition. Dark Quest Books, .
Brennan, Herbie The Doomsday
Box (HarperCollins/Balzer + Bray
978-0-06-175650-4, $6.99, 328pp,
tp, cover by Larry Rostant) Reprint
(Balzer + Bray 2011) young-adult
fantasy novel, second in the Shadow
Project series.
Brian, Kate The Book of Spells
(Simon & Schuster 978-1-4424-1237-
8, $9.99, 303pp, tp) Reprint (Simon &
Schuster 2010) young-adult dark fantasy,
a prequel to the Private series.
Burroughs, Edgar Rice The Gods
of Mars (Barnes & Noble/Fall River
Press 978-1-4351-3445-4, $7.95,
246pp, tp, cover by Kekai Kotaki)
Reprint (McClurg 1918) SF novel,
the second book in the John Carter
of Mars/Barsoom series.
Burroughs, Edgar Rice A Princess
of Mars (Barnes & Noble/Fall River
Press 978-1-4351-3448-5, $7.95,
204pp, tp, cover by Kotakik Kekai)
Reprint (McClurg 1917) SF novel, the
first book in the John Carter of Mars/
Barsoom series.
Burroughs, Edgar Rice The Return
of Tarzan (Barnes & Noble/Fall River
Press 978-1-4351-3444-7, $7.95,
273pp, tp) Reprint (McClurg 1915) of
the second novel in the Tarzan/The
Adventures of Lord Greystoke series.
Burroughs, Edgar Rice Tarzan of
the Apes (Barnes & Noble/Fall River
Press 978-1-4351-3447-8, $7.95,
281pp, tp, cover by Daryl Mandryk)
Reissue (McClurg 1914) of the first
novel in the Tarzan/The Adventures
of Lord Greystoke series.
Butcher, Jim Side Jobs (Penguin/
Roc 978-0-451-46384-5, $16.00,
418pp, tp, cover by Chris McGrath)
Reprint (Roc 2010) collection of 11
stories in the Dresden Files series.
Carl, William D. Bestial (Simon &
Schuster/Gallery/Permuted Press
978-1-4516-4685-6, $15.00, 296pp,
tp) Reprint (Permuted Press 2008,
not seen) werewolf horror novel.
* Carr, John F., ed. War World:
Takeover (Pequod Press 978-0-
937912-13-3, $42.50, 431pp, hc,
cover by Alan Gutierrez) Original
anthology of ten shared-world SF
stories (two reprints), the tenth
�
LOCUS February 2012 / 61

� Books Received
book in the overall War World Saga
set in the world created by Carr &
Jerry Pournelle, part of Pournelle’s
CoDominium/Empire of Man future
history. Pequod Press, PO Box
96, Boalsburg PA 16827; .
+ Christer, Sam The Stonehenge
Legacy (Overlook Press 978-1-
59020-676-8, $25.95, 362pp, hc)
Archaeological thriller with possible
supernatural elements. An
ancient cult uses human sacrifice
in an attempt to unlock the secret of
Stonehenge. First US edition (Sphere
1/11).
* Christopher, Adam Empire State
(Angry Robot US 978-0-85766-193-
7, $12.99, 415pp, pb, cover by Will
Staehle) Superhero SF noir detective
novel set in a parallel Prohibition-era
New York City. A first novel.
Clayton, Emma The Roar (Scholastic/
Chicken House 978-0-439-92785-7,
$8.99, 483pp, tp, cover by Phil Falco)
Reprint (Chicken House UK 2008)
young-adult dystopian novel.
* Cochran, Molly Legacy (Simon &
Schuster 978-1-4424-1739-7, $17.99,
hc) Young-adult paranromal romance.
Katy, stuck at a snooty boarding
school, uncovers family secrets
and dark forces at work. A Paula
Wiseman book.
* Cody, Matthew The Dead
Gentleman (Random House/Knopf
978-0-375-85596-2, $15.99, 280pp,
tp, cover by Odessa Sawyer) Middlegrade
steampunk/time-travel fantasy
adventure. Street orphan Tommy
Learner joins a group that explores
portals between worlds, traveling
between the present day and a 1901
New York City.
* Collins, Nancy A. Left Hand Magic
(Penguin/Roc 978-0-451-46430-9,
$7.99, 293pp, pb) Urban fantasy novel,
the second book in the Golgotham
series, set in NYC’s supernatural
ghetto.
* Connor, Ellen Daybreak (Berkley
Sensation 978-0-425-24340-4,
$15.00, 312pp, tp, cover by Gene
Mollica) Paranormal romance novel,
the third in the Dark Age Dawning
series. Copyrighted by Ann Aguirre
& Carrie Lofty.
Cook, Glen Introducing Garrett, P.I.
(Penguin/Roc 978-0-451-46397-5,
$16.00, 694pp, tp, cover by Stephen
Youll) Reprint (SFBC 1989 as the
Garrett Files) omnibus of the first
three fantasy mysteries featuring
Garrett, P.I.: Sweet Silver Blues
(1987), Bitter Gold Hearts (1988),
and Cold Copper Tears (1989).
* Cook, Glen A Path to Coldness
of Heart (Night Shade Books 978-
1-59780-329-8, $24.99, 430pp,
hc, cover by Raymond Swanland)
SF novel, the third and final book
in the Last Chronicle of the Dread
Empire. Night Shade Books, .
Cook, Kristi Haven (Simon Pulse
978-1-4424-0761-9, $9.99, 401pp, tp)
Reprint (Simon Pulse 2011) youngadult
paranormal romance.
Cook, Paul On the Rim of the
Mandala (Arc Manor/Phoenix Pick
978-1-61242-004-2, $9.99, 255pp,
tp) Reprint (Spectra 1987) SF novel.
This is a print-on-demand edition.
Arc Manor, PO Box 10339, Rockville
62 / LOCUS February 2012
MD 20849; .
* Cooke, Deborah Winging It
(Penguin/NAL 978-0-451-23489-6,
$9.99, 328pp, tp) Young-adult paranormal
romance novel, the second in
the Dragon Diaries series, a spin-off
from the adult Dragonfire series. The
author also writes as Claire Cross and
Claire Delacroix.
* Cooper, Isabel No Proper Lady
(Sourcebooks Casablanca 978-1-
4022-5952-4, $6.99, 329pp, pb, cover
by Anne Cain) Time-travel fantasy
romance. An assassin travels from
2088 back to 1888 to stop a dark
magician from destroying the world.
* Copperman, E.J. An Uninvited
Ghost (Berkley Prime Crime 978-0-
425-24058-8, $7.99, 293pp, pb, cover
by Dominick Finelle) Paranormal
mystery, the second in the Haunted
Guesthouse series. This is a pen
name for Jeffrey Cohen.
Cornish, D.M. Factotum (Penguin/
Firebird 978-0-14-241944-1, $10.99,
684pp, tp, cover by Jaime Jones)
Reprint (Omnibus Australia 2010)
young-adult fantasy novel, the third
and final in the Foundling’s Tale
series, part of the overall Monster
Blood Tattoo series. Illustrated by
the author.
* Coverstone, Stacey A Haunted
Twist of Fate (Gale Group/Five Star
978-1-4328-2541-6, $25.95, 277pp,
hc) Paranormal romance/mystery
novel. Shay inadvertently buys a
haunted saloon.
* Cross, Julie Tempest (St. Martin’s
Griffin 978-0-312-56889-4, $17.99,
334pp, hc, cover by James Porto)
Young-adult fantasy romance novel,
the first book in a trilogy. Jackson
Meyer has the ability to travel in time,
and tries to use it to save his girlfriend.
A first novel. A Thomas Dunne book.
* Cunningham, Elizabeth Red-Robed
Priestess (Monkfish Publishing
978-0-9823246-9-1, $25.95, 294pp,
hc, cover by Leonardo da Vinci)
Historical/Biblical novel with elements
of Celtic fantasy, fourth and
final in the Maev Chronicles (or
The Magdalen) series, about Mary
Magdalen, who is actually a druid
named Maeve.
* Dane, Tami Blood of Eden
(Kensington 978-0-7582-6709-2,
$7.99, 344pp, pb) Urban fantasy/
paranormal romance novel. Skeptical
FBI intern Sloan Skye gets assigned
to the Paranormal Behavioral
Analysis Unit.
* Daniels, Casey A Hard Day’s Fright
(Berkley Prime Crime 978-0-425-
24056-4, $7.99, 292pp, pb, cover
by Don Sipley) Paranormal mystery
novel, the seventh in the Pepper
Martin series. A ghost gets Pepper to
investigate the death of a teen after a
Beatles concert in 1966. Copyrighted
by Connie Laux.
* Dark, Juliet The Demon Lover
(Ballantine 978-0-345-51008-2,
$15.00, 416pp, tp) Paranormal romance
novel, the first in the Fairwick
Chronicles series. Callie McFay,
a new folklore teacher at Fairwick
College, starts having disturbing
dreams. This is a pen name for Carol
Goodman.
David, Peter Star Trek: New
Frontier: Blind Man’s Bluff (Pocket
978-1-4516-1169-4, $7.99, 374pp,
pb) Reprint (Gallery 2011) Star Trek
novel. Copyrighted by CBS Studios.
Davidson, MaryJanice Undead and
Unemployed (Berkley Sensation
978-0-425-24342-8, $15.00, 255pp,
tp, cover by Don Sipley) Reprint
(Berkley Sensation 2004) vampire
romance, second in the series about
Betsy, Queen of the Vampires.
* Drake, David Voyage Across the
Stars (Baen 978-1-4516-3771-7,
$12.00, xi + 665pp, tp, cover by Sam
Kennedy) Omnibus of two SF novels
inspired by Ancient Greek epics
and set in the Hammer’s Slammers
universe: Cross the Stars (1984)
and The Voyage (1994). Foreword
by Cecelia Holland; introduction by
Drake.
+ du Maurier, Daphne The Doll: The
Lost Short Stories (Harper 978-
0-06-208034-9, $14.99, 210pp, tp)
Associational collection of 13 stories
(many gothic in tone, including at
least one ghost story) from early in
du Maurier’s career, all but one originally
written from 1926-1932; eight
were previously collected in Early
Stories (Todd 1955). First US edition
(Virago 5/11).
* Dunn, Christian, ed. Warhammer:
Age of Legend (Black Library US
978-1-84970-101-3, $8.99, 411pp,
pb, cover by Clint Langley) Original
anthology of ten stories (one previously
released in audio form) based
on the world of the SF roleplaying
game, part of the Time of Legends
series. Simultaneous with the Black
Library UK edition. Copyrighted by
Games Workshop.
* Eco, Umberto The Prague
Cemetery (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
978-0-547-57753-1, $27.00, 445pp,
hc) Associational historical novel with
elements of secret history, narrated
by a psychotic, in which one man is
behind all the major conspiracies
in 19th-century Europe. Translated
by Richard Dixon from the Italian Il
Cimitero di Praga (RCS Libri 2010).
Simultaneous with the UK (Harvill
Secker) edition.
* Ewing, Lynne Sisters of Isis,
Volume 1 (Disney/Hyperion 978-
1-4231-4402-1, $9.99, 523pp, tp)
Omnibus of two novels in a youngadult
contemporary fantasy series:
The Summoning (2007) and Divine
One (2007).
* Fantaskey, Beth Jessica Rules
the Dark Side (Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt/Harcourt 978-0-547-39309-
4, $16.99, 309pp, hc, cover by Cliff
Nielsen) Young-adult paranormal
romance novel, sequel to Jessica’s
Guide to Dating on the Dark Side.
Jessica’s trying to prove herself fit to
be vampire queen, when her husband
is accused of murder.
Farmer, Nancy The Ear, the Eye,
and the Arm (Scholastic 978-0-545-
35661-9, $6.99, 311pp, tp) Reprint
(Orchard 1994) young-adult SF novel
of Zimbabwe in 2194.
Farmer, Nancy A Girl Named
Disaster (Scholastic 978-0-545-
35662-6, $6.99, 309pp, tp) Reissue
(Orchard 1996) young-adult novel
with fantasy elements.
* Faust, Terry Z Is for Xenophobe
(Sam’s Dot 978-0-9832673-9-3,
$13.95, 205pp, tp, cover by Mitchell
Davidson Bentley) SF novel, the first
book in a series featuring photographer
Bob Putnam, who discovers
aliens and cover-up conspiracies
in the American Midwest. Sam’s
Dot Publishing, PO Box 782, Cedar
Rapids IA 52406-0782; .
* Fennell, Judi Genie Knows Best
(Sourcebooks Casablanca 978-1-
4022-4190-1, $6.99, 358pp, pb, cover
by Anne Cain) Paranormal romance
novel. Samantha Blaine becomes
master to a tall, dark, and handsome
genie.
* Fenner, Cathy & Arnie Fenner,
eds. Spectrum 18: The Best in
Contemporary Fantastic Art
(Underwood Books 978-1-59929-
059-1, $45.00, 304pp, hc, cover
by Jean-Sebastien Rossbach) Art
yearbook, this covers 2010, with over
450 reproductions of works by more
than 300 artists, chosen by a jury.
Arnie Fenner discusses ‘‘The Year
in Review.’’ This includes a profile of
Grand Master Award winner Ralph
McQuarrie. A trade paperback edition
(-058-4, $35.00) is also available.
Underwood Books, PO Box 1919,
Nevada City CA 95959; .
Ferrari, Mark J. The Book of Joby
(Tor 978-0-7653-5611-6, $ 8.99,
754pp, pb, cover by Mark J. Ferrari)
Reprint (Tor 2007) fantasy novel
mixing the Book of Job and Arthurian
myth.
Fitzpatrick, Becca Crescendo
(Simon & Schuster 978-1-4169-
8944-8, $9.99, 427pp, tp) Reprint
(Simon & Schuster 2010) young-adult
paranormal romance novel, sequel to
Hush, Hush.
* Fleskes, John, ed. Flesk Prime
(Flesk Publications 978-1-933865-
38-6, $24.95, 64pp, hc, cover by
Craig Elliott, Gary Gianni, Petar
Meseldzija, et al.) Art book, a collection
of drawings and paintings by five
artists: Craig Elliott, Petar Meseldzija,
Gary Gianni, Mark Schultz, and
William Stout. Introductions and afterword
by Fleskes. Flesk Publications,
PO Box 54044, San Jose CA 95154;
.
* Flint, Eric & Paula Goodlett, eds.
Grantville Gazette VI (Baen 978-
1-4516-3768-7, $25.00, 435pp, hc,
cover by Tom Kidd) Shared-world
alternate-history anthology of 24
stories based on Flint’s Ring of Fire
universe, selected from stories originally
published in the online Grantville
Gazette.
* Flynn, Michael In the Lion’s Mouth
(Tor 978-0-7653-2285-2, $25.99,
303pp, hc, cover by Sparth) Farfuture
SF space opera novel, the third
in the Spiral Arm series after The
January Dancer and Up Jim River.
* Fowler, Christopher Hell Train
(Rebellion/Solaris US 978-1-907992-
44-5, $8.99, 319pp, pb, cover by
Graham Humphreys) Horror novel.
Train passengers traveling through
Eastern Europe during WWI face
mysterious horrors. Simultaneous
with the Solaris UK edition.
* Francis, Diana Pharaoh Shadow
City (Pocket 978-1-4516-1385-8,
$7.99, 369pp, pb) Urban fantasy
novel, third in the Horngate Witches
series.
* Fulbright, Christopher & Angeline
Hawkes Scavengers (Elder Signs
Press 978-1-934501-24-5, $14.95,
312pp, tp, cover by Steven Gilberts)
Zombie horror novel.
* Gaider, David Dragon Age:
Asunder (Tor 978-0-7653-3117-5,
$15.99, 414pp, tp, cover by Ramil

Sunga) Novelization based on the
BioWare Dragon Age computer
games. Copyrighted by Electronic
Arts.
* Gaiman, Neil & Leslie S. Klinger The
Annotated Sandman Volume One
(DC Comics/Vertigo 978-1-4012-
3332-7, $49.00, 560pp, hc, cover by
Dave McKean) Annotated graphic
novel/omnibus collecting the first
20 issues of the Sandman comics
written by Neil Gaiman, originally collected
in graphic novels Preludes &
Nocturnes (1991), The Doll’s House
(1990), and Dream Country (1991).
The comics are reproduced in b&w.
Edited and with an introduction and
notes by Klinger, who had access
to Gaiman’s original scripts and
related correspondence. Foreword
by Gaiman.
* Gear, W. Michael & Kathleen
O’Neal Gear The Broken Land
(Tor 978-0-7653-2694-2, $25.99,
366pp, hc, cover by Cliff Nielsen)
Associational historical novel in the
First North Americans (now retitled
North America’s Forgotten Past) series;
this is the third in the People of
the Longhouse series about Iroquois
leaders from the 15th century.
Gleason, Robert & Junius Podrug
Gary Jennings’ The 2012 Codex
(Tor 978-0-7653-6246-9, $7.99,
518pp, pb) Reprint (Forge 2010) thriller
of the Mayan end of the world, sequel
to Gary Jennings’ Apocalypse
2012. Inspired by Jennings’s Aztec
series and written by Gleason &
Podrug.
* Goss, Theodora The Thorn and the
Blossom (Quirk Books 978-1-59474-
551-5, $16.95, 80pp, tp) Fantasy novella
of a romance, told in two parts.
This is bound accordian style with two
sides: ‘‘Brendan’s Story’’ on one side
and ‘‘Evelyn’s Story’’ on the other,
with a card-stock slipcase.
* Greenberg, Martin H. & Jennifer
Brozek, eds. Human for a Day (DAW
978-0-7564-0700-1, $7.99, 305pp,
pb) Original anthology of 16 stories.
Authors include Jay Lake, Seanan
McGuire, and Tanith Lee.
* Grossman, Lev The Magician King
(Penguin/Viking 978-0-670-02231-1,
$26.95, 400pp, hc, cover by Didier
Massard) Contemporary fantasy
novel, sequel to The Magicians.
* Haldeman, Joe Earthbound (Ace
978-0-441-02095-9, $24.95, 261pp,
hc, cover by Fred Gambino) SF novel,
third in a series after Marsbound and
Starbound.
Halpern, Jake & Peter Kujawinski
World’s End (Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt/Sandpiper 978-0-547-
57719-7, $7.99, 490pp, tp, cover by
John Rocco) Reprint (Houghton
Mifflin 2010) young-adult fantasy
novel, sequel to Dormia.
Harkness, Deborah A Discovery of
Witches (Penguin 978-0-14-311968-
5, $16.00, 579pp, tp) Reprint (Viking
2011) paranormal romance novel,
the first book in the All Souls trilogy.
* Hartley, A.J. Darwen Arkwright
and the Peregrine Pact (Penguin/
Razorbill 978-1-59514-409-6, $16.99,
438pp, hc, cover by Emily Osborne)
Middle-grade fantasy novel. Darwen
Arkwright moves to Atlanta, Georgia
and finds another world in a mirror.
+ Harvey, Alyxandra Bleeding
Hearts (Bloomsbury/Walker US
978-0-8027-2284-3, $9.99, 347pp, tp)
Young-adult urban fantasy/romance
novel, the fourth book in the Drake
Chronicles. This includes bonus story
‘‘Lost Girls’’, available only in the print
edition. A hardcover edition (-2285-
0, $16.99) was announced but not
seen. First US edition (Bloomsbury
UK 10/11).
* Harvey, Alyxandra Stolen Away
(Bloomsbury/Walker US 978-0-
8027-2189-1, $17.99, hc) Young-adult
fantasy/romance novel. Eloise Hart is
kidnapped by the Faery King.
Heinlein, Robert A. Sixth Column
(Baen 978-1-4516-3770-0, $13.00, vii
+ 183pp, tp, cover by Bob Eggleton)
Reprint (Gnome Press 1949) SF
novel. This has a new introduction
by William H. Patterson, Jr., and
afterword by Tom Kratman.
* Herbert, Brian & Kevin J. Anderson
Sisterhood of Dune (Tor 978-0-
7653-2273-9, $27.99, 496pp, hc,
cover by Steve Stone) SF novel in the
Dune series started by Frank Herbert;
this is set 80 years after the Battle
of Corrin. Copyrighted by Herbert
Properties.
* Hill, Joey W. Bound by the Vampire
Queen (Berkley Heat 978-0-425-
24344-2, $16.00, 449pp, tp, cover
by Don Sipley) Erotic paranormal
romance novel in the Vampire Queen
series.
Hill, Susan The Woman in Black
(Random House/Vintage 978-0-307-
74531-6, $14.00, 164pp, tp) Reprint
(Hamish Hamilton 1983) ghost story
novel. This is a movie tie-in edition.
Hocking, Amanda Switched (St.
Martin’s Griffin 978-1-2500-0631-8,
$8.99, 318pp, tp) Young-adult fantasy
novel, the first book in the Trylle trilogy.
Previously self-published as an
e-book/POD through CreateSpace
(2010); this adds an original bonus
story, ‘‘The Vitra Attacks’’.
* Hodder, Mark Expedition
to the Mountains of the Moon
(Prometheus/Pyr 978-1-61614-535-
4, $16.00, 398pp, tp, cover by Jon
Sullivan) Steampunk horror novel,
the third in the Burton & Swinburne
series.
Holland, Jaymie Claimed by
Pleasure (St. Martin’s Griffin 978-0-
312-38667-2, $14.99, 227pp, tp, cover
by Tricia Schmitt) Reprint (Ellora’s
Cave 2004 as Wonderland: King
of Spades by Cheyenne McCray)
erotic paranormal romance novel in
the Taken by Passion/Wonderland
series; originally published in e-book
form (Ellora’s Cave 2003). Holland is
a pen name for Cheyenne McCray.
Hunt, Stephen The Rise of the Iron
Moon (Tor 978-0-7653-6610-8,
$7.99, 455pp, pb) Reprint (Voyager
2009) steampunk fantasy novel, third
in the series begun in The Court of
the Air.
Hunter, Erin Warriors: Omen of
the Stars: Night Whispers (Harper
978-0-06-155517-6, $6.99, 295pp,
tp, cover by Wayne McLoughlin)
Reprint (Harper 2010) young-adult
fantasy novel in the series about
warrior cats, the third book in the
Omen of the Stars sub-series. The
author is probably Kate Cary. This
includes ‘‘Uninvited Guests’’, a separately
paginated 35-page roleplaying
adventure in the Warriors Adventure
Game. Packaged and copyrighted by
Working Partners Limited.
* Husk, Shona The Goblin King
(Sourcebooks Casablanca 978-1-
4022-5985-2, $6.99, 317pp, pb, cover
by Don Sipley) Paranormal romance
novel about a former Celtic king
cursed to become part of a Goblin
Horde, the first book in a series.
* Ione, Larissa Immortal Rider
(Grand Central 978-0-446-57447-1,
$7.99, 414pp, pb, cover by Craig
White) Paranormal romance novel,
second in the Lords of Deliverance
series.
* Ivy, Alexandra Bound by Darkness
(Kensington/Zebra 978-1-4201-
1136-1, $7.99, 374pp, pb) Vampire
romance, the eighth book in the
Guardians of Eternity series.
Copyrighted by Debbie Raleigh.
Jama-Everett, Ayize The Liminal
People (Small Beer Press 978-1-
931520-33-1, $16.00, 190pp, tp, cover
by Adam S. Doyle) Reprint (Prophet
& Assassin Productions 2009) SF
novel. Originally self-pubished; this
is copyrighted 2011. Small Beer
Press, 150 Pleasant Street #306,
Easthampton MA 01027; .
* Jewel, Carolyn My Dangerous
Pleasure (Grand Central/Forever
978-0-446-56387-1, $7.99, 356pp,
pb) Paranormal romance novel, the
fourth book in the My Immortal series.
Jones, Darynda Second Grave
on the Left (St. Martin’s Griffin
978-1-250-00270-9, $14.99, 307pp,
tp, cover by Tom Hallman) Reprint
(St. Martin’s 2011) urban fantasy/
paranormal romance/mystery novel,
second in the series about female PI
Charley Davidson, who moonlights
as the Grim Reaper.
Jones, Howard Andrew The Desert
of Souls (St. Martin’s Griffin 978-
1-250-00199-3, $14.99, 309pp, tp)
Reprint (St. Martin’s 2011) sword
and sorcery Arabian fantasy novel.
A Thomas Dunne book.
* Julian, Stephanie How to Worship a
Goddess (Sourcebooks Casablanca
978-1-4022-5150-4, $14.99, 282pp,
tp) Paranormal romance novel, the
second in the Forgotten Goddesses
series about about Etruscan deities
in the contemporary US. Lusna,
Goddess of the Moon, is now just
Lucy, who falls for a local hockey
player.
* Kahn, Gustave The Tale of Gold
and Silence (Black Coat Press 978-
1-61227-063-0, $20.95, 262pp, tp,
cover by Mike Hoffman) SF novel,
translated/adapted from the French
Le Conte de l’or et du silence
(Societé du Mercure de France
1898) by Brian Stableford, who also
provides an introduction. A print-ondemand
edition. Hollywood Comics.
com, PO Box 17270, Encino CA
91416; .
Keaton, Kelly Darkness Becomes
Her (Simon Pulse 978-1-4424-0925-
5, $9.99, 273pp, tp) Reprint (Simon
Pulse 2011) young-adult near-future
fantasy novel.
* Kikuchi, Hideyuki Demon City
Shinjuku: The Complete Edition
(Digital Manga Publishing 978-1-
56970-208-6, $14.95, 425pp, tp)
Omnibus of two dark fantasy novels in
the series: Demon City Shinjuku and
Demon Palace Babylon. Illustrated
by Jun Suemi. Translated by Eugene
Woodbury from the Japanese. The
original date is uncertain; this is
copyrighted 2005 but says ‘‘originally
published in Japan in 2007 by ASAHI
Shimbun.’’
* Kinch, Michael The Fires of New
Sun (Llewellyn/Flux 978-0-7387-
3076-9, $9.95, 275pp, tp) Youngadult
SF novel, second in the series
started in The Blending Time.
* King, Stephen 11/22/63 (Simon &
Schuster/Scribner 978-1-4516-2728-
2, $35.00, 849pp, hc) SF time travel
novel. A temporal hole in a Maine
diner leads to one day in 1958, and
two men try to use it to stop the
Kennedy assassination.
King, Stephen ’Salem’s Lot (Random
House/Anchor 978-0-307-74367-1,
$7.99, 653pp, pb) Reprint (Doubleday
1975) vampire horror novel.
* Knaak, Richard A. Dragon Mound
(Sea Lion Books 978-0-9828186-1-
9, $24.95, 512pp, hc, cover by Jon
Sullivan) Fantasy novel, the first in
the Knight in Shadow trilogy.
* Knight, E.E. Dragon Fate (Penguin/
Roc 978-0-451-46356-2, $16.00,
352pp, tp, cover by Paul Youll)
Fantasy novel, the sixth and final
book in The Age of Fire series.
Knight, E.E. March in Country
(Penguin/Roc 978-0-451-46360-9,
$7.99, 358pp, pb, cover by Steve
Stone) Reprint (Roc 2011) SF horror
novel, book nine of The Vampire
Earth.
* Koch, Gini Alien Proliferation
(DAW 978-0-7564-0697-4, $7.99,
458pp, pb, cover by Daniel Dos
Santos) SF novel, fourth in the series
begun in Touched by an Alien. Kitty
Katt-Martini is about to become a
mother to a half-alien child.
+ Koonchung, Chan The Fat Years
(Random House/Doubleday/Talese
978-0-385-53434-5, $26.95, xxi +
301pp, hc) Near-future SF novel.
A Chinese writer discovers there’s
a month missing from history, between
the time Western civilization
collapsed and China became
the world’s preeminent superpower.
Translated from the Chinese
Shengshi: Zhongguo 2013 (Oxford
University Press (China) 2009) by
Michael S. Duke, who provides notes.
Preface by Julia Lovell. First US edition
(Doubleday UK 7/11).
* Koontz, Dean 77 Shadow Street
(Bantam 978-0-553-80771-4, $28.00,
451pp, hc) Horror novel about a luxury
apartment building where residents
are driven to dark fates.
Kress, Nancy Beggars in Spain
(Arc Manor/Phoenix Pick 978-1-
61242-057-8, $4.99, 98pp, tp) Reprint
(Axolotl 1991) Hugo and Nebula
Award-winning SF novella. A printon-demand
edition. Arc Manor, PO
Box 10339, Rockville MD 20849-
0339; .
* Lackey, Mercedes, ed. Under the
Vale and Other Tales of Valdemar
(DAW 978-0-7564-0696-7, $7.99,
343pp, pb, cover by Jody A. Lee)
Original anthology of 17 fantasy
stories set in Lackey’s world of
Valdemar, the seventh in the Tales
of Valdemar series. Authors include
Sarah Hoyt, Tanya Huff, and Larry
Dixon. Copyrighted by Lackey and
Martin H. Greenberg’s Tekno Books.
Lackey, Mercedes, Steve Libbey,
Cody Martin, & Dennis Lee Invasion
(Baen 978-1-4516-3772-4, $7.99,
559pp, pb, cover by Larry Dixon)
Reprint (Baen 2011) mosaic novel,
�
LOCUS February 2012 / 63

� Books Received
the first book in the Secret World
Chronicle. This lacks the bound-in
CD-ROM of the hardcover edition.
* Lang, Michele Dark Victory (Tor
978-0-7653-2318-7, $15.99, 318pp,
tp) Historical fantasy romance novel,
sequel to Lady Lazarus. Magda
and the angel Raziel prepare to fight
Hitler’s invasion of Poland.
* Lee, Patrick Deep Sky (Harper
978-0-06-195879-3, $7.99, 384pp,
pb) SF thriller, the third in the Breach
trilogy featuring ex-cop/ex-con Travis
Chase.
* Lee, Rachel Claim the Night
(Harlequin/Nocturne 978-0-
373-61874-3, $5.50, 282pp, pb)
Paranormal romance novel in the
Claiming series. Lee is a pen name
for Sue Civil-Brown.
* Leigh, Lora Lawe’s Justice (Berkley
978-0-425-24395-4, $7.99, 354pp,
pb) Paranormal romance novel, 11th
in the Breeds series. Copyrighted by
Christina Simmons.
* Lethem, Jonathan The Ecstasy
of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
(Random House/Doubleday 978-
0-385-53495-6, $27.95, 437pp, hc)
Non-fiction collection of essays,
memoirs, reviews, liner notes, at least
one poem, and so on; a mix of new
and reprint material.
* Lindsey, Mary Shattered Souls
(Penguin/Philomel 978-0-399-
25622-6, $16.99, 326pp, hc, cover by
Tony Sahara) Young-adult paranormal
romance novel. Lindsey learns
she’s a reincarnated Speaker, able
to talk to lost souls.
Locke, M.J. Up Against It (Tor 978-
0-7653-5421-1, $7.99, 452pp, pb,
cover by Donato Giancola) Reprint
(Tor 2011) SF novel.
* Lofficier, Jean-Marc & Randy
Lofficier, eds. Tales of the
Shadowmen, Volume 8: Agents
Provocateurs (Black Coat Press
978-1-61227-050-0, $22.95, 305pp,
tp, cover by Jean-Claude Claeys)
Original anthology of 22 pastiche/
mash-up stories featuring characters
from French pulps, SF, and other
literary sources. A print-on-demand
edition. Hollywood Comics.com, PO
Box 17270, Encino CA 91416; .
* Love, John Faith (Night Shade
Books 978-1-59780-390-8, $14.99,
373pp, tp, cover by Adam Paquette)
SF novel. A mysterious alien ship
dubbed Faith attacks the worlds of the
Commonwealth. A first novel.
* MacAvoy, R.A. Death and
Resurrection (Prime Books 978-
1-60701-286-3, $14.95, 333pp, tp,
cover by Maurizio Manzieri) Fantasy
novel. Artist Ewen Young gains the
ability to travel between the worlds
of life and death.
* Maitland, Piper Acquainted with
the Night (Berkley 978-0-425-
24363-3, $9.99, 539pp, pb, cover by
S. Miroque) Supernatural suspense/
horror novel. A woman investigates
her uncle’s murder with the help of a
biochemist who wants to rid the world
of vampires.
* Maloney, Mack UFOs in Wartime:
What They Didn’t Want You to
Know (Berkley 978-0-425-24011-3,
$7.99, x + 294pp, pb) Associational
non-fiction. Foreword by Keith
64 / LOCUS February 2012
Chester. Maloney is a pen name for
Brian Kelleher.
Marmell, Ari The Warlord’s Legacy
(Ballantine Spectra 978-0-553-
59316-7, $7.99, 374pp, pb, cover
by Larry Rostant) Reprint (Spectra
2011) fantasy novel, sequel to The
Conqueror’s Shadow.
Martin, George R.R., ed. Wild Cards
II: Aces High (Tor 978-0-7653-2616-
4, $15.99, 399pp, tp, cover by Michael
Komarck) Reprint (Bantam Spectra
1987) shared-world anthology of
superhero stories.
Martin, George R.R. & Gardner
Dozois, eds. Songs of the Dying
Earth (Tor 978-0-7653-3109-0,
$17.99, 669pp, tp, cover by Felix
Ziem) Reprint (Subterranean 2009)
anthology of 22 stories in tribute to
Jack Vance, set in his far-future world
of the Dying Earth. Preface by Vance;
introduction by Dean Koontz.
McBain, Ed, ed. Transgressions:
John Farris: The Ransome
Women/Stephen King: The Things
They Left Behind (Tor/Forge 978-
0-7653-4751-0, $7.99, 304pp, pb)
Reissue (Forge 2005 as part of
Transgressions) associational
anthology of two mystery novellas
by John Farris and Stephen King.
Third printing.
+ McCabe, Sean Vampire
Federation: The Cross (Penguin/
Signet Select 978-0-451-41316-1,
$9.99, 471pp, tp) Vampire horror
novel, the second in the Vampire
Federation series featuring Detective
Inspector Joel Solomon and Vampire
Intelligence Agency agent Alex
Bishop. This is a premium/tall racksize
edition. First US edition (Avon UK
10/11 as by Scott G. Mariani).
McCaffrey, Anne The Rowan (Ace
978-0-441-73576-1, $7.99, 328pp,
pb, cover by Danny O’Leary) Reissue
(Ace 1990) SF novel, the first book in
the Tower and the Hive series; 21st
printing.
* McCammon, Robert The Hunter
from the Woods (Subterranean
Press 978-1-59606-413-3, $75.00,
327pp, hc, cover by Vincent Chong)
Original collection of six linked stories
about Michael Gallatin from The
Wolf’s Hour. A signed, limited edition
of 1,000. A traycased, leatherbound
edition of 26 ($250.00) is also available.
Subterranean Press, PO Box
190106, Burton MI 48519; .
* McCullough, Kelly Broken Blade
(Ace 978-1-937007-08-9, $7.99,
291pp, pb, cover by John Jude
Palencar) Fantasy novel, the first
book in the Fallen Blade series about
former assassin Aral Kingslayer.
McKillip, Patricia A. The Bards of
Bone Plain (Ace 978-1-937007-23-2,
$15.00, 329pp, tp, cover by Kinuko
Y. Craft) Reprint (Ace 2010) fantasy
novel.
McKissack, Patricia C., Fredrick L. &
John McKissack Cyborg (Scholastic
978-0-439-92986-8, $6.99, 122pp,
tp, cover by Ken Choi) Reprint
(Scholastic Press 2011) young-adult
SF novella, the second book in the
Clone Codes series.
* McNeill, Graham Arkham Horror:
Ghouls of the Miskatonic (Fantasy
Flight Publishing 978-1-58994-
965-2, $8.99, 329pp, pb, cover by
Anders Finér) Gaming tie-in novel,
the first book in the Dark Waters tril-
ogy. Copyrighted by Fantasy Flight
Publishing.
* Mead, Richelle Shadow Heir
(Kensington/Zebra 978-1-4201-1180-
4, $7.99, 390pp, pb) Paranormal
romance novel, fourth and final in the
Dark Swan series.
* Mead, Richelle, Grant Alter, & Dave
Hamann Dark Swan: Storm Born,
Volume 1 (Sea Lion Books 978-0-
9828186-4-0, $19.95, unpaginated,
hc) Graphic novel adaptation of the
first part of Mead’s Storm Born, the
first book in the Dark Swan series;
originally published as issues 1-4
of the comic book. Written/adapted
by Mead & Alter; illustrated by Dave
Hamann & Adam Markiewicz.
* Meikle, William The Creeping Kelp
(Dark Regions Press 978-1-937128-
15-0, $16.95, 155pp, tp, cover by
Wayne Miller) Horror novella, expanded
from the eponymous story. A storm
in the Atlantic frees a long-dormant
creature with a taste for plastic, and
it grows with devastating speed.
This is copyrighted 2011. A limited
hardcover edition of 200 ($45.00)
and leatherbound slipcased edition of
26 ($99.00) were announced but not
seen. This is copyrighted 2011. Dark
Regions Press, PO Box 1264, Colusa
CA 95932; .
* Melton, Henry The Copper Room
(Wire Rim Books 978-1-935236-33-
7, $14.99, 223pp, tp, cover by Fred
Perry & Wes Hartman) SF novel in
the Small Towns, Big Ideas series.
Jerry’s idea to use a time machine
to get time alone with a girl backfires
when they end up trapped in the far
future. This is a print-on-demand
edition. Wire Rim Books, 188 Spring
Valley St., Hutto TX 78634-5132;
.
* Merritt, Asa, ed. First Blood: Birth
of the Vampire 1732-1897 (Arc
Manor/Phoenix Pick 978-1-60450-
481-1, $24.99, 553pp, tp) Anthology
of early pieces that influenced the
development of the modern idea of
vampires, with two novellas, four
poems, a non-fiction piece, excerpts
from Varney the Vampire by James
Malcolm Rymer, and the full text of
Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Introductions
discuss the influences of the pieces.
A print-on-demand edition. Arc
Manor, PO Box 10339, Rockville MD
20849-0339; .
Meyer, Stephenie Breaking Dawn
(Little Brown 978-0-316-13393-7,
$14.99, 756pp, tp) Reissue (Little,
Brown 2008) young-adult vampire
novel, fourth in the trilogy begun in
Twilight. This is a movie tie-in edition,
with a bound-in poster.
Michaelis, Antonia Dragons of
Darkness (Abrams/Amulet 978-1-
4197-0085-9, $8.95, 548pp, tp, cover
by Cliff Nielsen) Reprint (Amulet
2010) young-adult fantasy novel.
Translated by Anthea Bell from the
German Drachen der Finsternis
(Loewe 2006).
* Miller, Kristin Vamped Up
(HarperCollins/Avon Impulse 978-
0-06-213330-4, $7.99, 404pp, pb)
Paranormal romance, the second in
the Vampires of Crimson Bay series.
* Miranda, Megan Fracture
(Bloomsbury/Walker US 978-0-
8027-2309-3, $17.99, 262pp, hc)
Young-adult paranormal romance
novel. Delaney Maxwell miraculously
survives drowning, and finds herself
strangely drawn to people about to
die. A first novel.
* Naughton, Elisabeth Tempted
(Sourcebooks Casablanca 978-
1-4022-6046-9, $7.99, 402pp, pb,
cover by Patricia Schmitt) Paranormal
romance novel, third in the Eternal
Guardians series.
* Nayeri, Daniel Straw House,
Wood House, Brick House, Blow
(Candlewick Press 978-0-7636-
5526-6, $19.99, 406pp, hc, cover by
Scott Nobles) Young-adult original
collection of four novellas mixing
various genres: fantasy, SF, mystery,
and romance. Illustrated by James
Weinberg.
Noël, Alyson Dark Flame (St. Martin’s
Griffin 978-0-312-58375-0, $9.99,
320pp, tp) Reprint (Griffin 2010)
young-adult paranormal romance
novel, the fourth in the Immortals
series.
* Owens, Robin D. Hearts and
Swords (Berkley Sensation 978-0-
425-24341-1, $15.00, 452pp, tp, cover
by Tony Mauro) Original collection of
four stories in the futuristic science
fantasy romance series set on the
planet of Celta.
* Palmer, Philip Artemis (Orbit US
978-0-316-12514-7, $13.99, 400pp,
tp, cover by Eric Westpheling) Farfuture
SF adventure novel, related
to Debatable Space. Book-loving
killer Artemis McIvor is given a
choice between prison and fighting
rebels. Simultaneous with the Orbit
UK edition.
+ Patterson, James & Jill Dembowski
Witch & Wizard: The Fire (Little
Brown 978-0-316-10190-5, $17.99,
336pp, hc, cover by Sean Freeman)
Young-adult dystopian fantasy novel,
the third book in the Witch & Wizard
series. First US edition (Arrow 10/11).
* Patton, Brett Mecha Corps
(Penguin/Roc 978-0-451-46431-6,
$7.99, 324pp, pb) SF space opera
novel in the Armor Wars series.
Cadets learning to ride the powerful
biomechanical Mechas are being
sabotaged by an unseen power. This
is a pen name for Jason Stoddard.
* Pellerin, Georges The World in
2000 Years (Black Coat Press 978-1-
61227-058-6, $20.95, 246pp, tp, cover
by Jean-Pierre Normand) SF novel,
translated/adapted from the French
Le Monde dans deux mille ans (E.
Dentu 1878) by Brian Stableford,
who also provides an introduction
and notes. This is a print-on-demand
edition. Hollywood Comics.com, PO
Box 17270, Encino CA 91416; .
* Piñeiro, Caridad The Lost (Grand
Central/Forever 978-0-446-58461-6,
$7.99, 317pp, pb) Paranormal romantic
suspense novel, the first in the Sin
Hunters series.
Pohl, Frederik All the Lives He
Led (Tor 978-0-7653-6145-5, $7.99,
385pp, pb, cover by Joseph Wright)
Reprint (Tor 2011) near-future SF
novel/thriller.
Powers, Tim The Bible Repairman
and Other Stories (Subterranean
Press 978-1-59606-453-9, $75.00,
165pp, tp, cover by J.K. Potter)
Reprint (Tachyon Publications 2011)
collection of six stories, with a general
introduction and individual story
afterwords by Powers. Illustrated by
J.K. Potter. This is a signed, limited
edition of 500; a leatherbound, traycased
lettered edition of 26 is also

available. Tachyon Publications, 1459
18th St. #139, San Francisco CA
94107; .
Pullman, Philip His Dark Materials
(Random House/Everyman’s Library
978-0-307-95783-2, $35.00, xviii +
1099pp, hc, cover by Kate Baylay)
Reprint (SFBC 2000) omnibus of
the young-adult fantasy trilogy: The
Golden Compass (1995 as His Dark
Materials 1: Northern Lights), The
Subtle Knife (1997), and The Amber
Spyglass (2000). This follows the
Knopf 2007 edition with sections of
‘‘Lantern Slides,’’ notes and vignettes
of missing scenes from each novel.
There is a new preface by Pullman
and introduction by Lucy Hughes-
Hallett.
* Putney, M.J. Dark Passage (St.
Martin’s Griffin 978-0-312-62285-5,
$9.99, 295pp, tp, cover by Richard
Tuschman) Young-adult Regency/
time travel fantasy/paranormal romance
novel, the second in a series.
The author also writes as Mary Jo
Putney.
+ Rees, Rod The Demi-Monde:
Winter (HarperCollins/Morrow 978-
0-06-207034-0, $26.99, 517pp, hc)
SF novel, the first in a four-book
series. The President’s daughter is
trapped in a computer simulation
designed to train soldiers in urban
warfare. First US edition (Quercus
1/11).
Reger, Rob & Jessica Gruner Emily
the Strange: Dark Times (Harper
978-0-06-145237-6, $8.99, 233pp, tp,
cover by Rob Reger) Reprint (Harper
2010 young-adult SF novel in the
form of a diary, the third in the series.
Emily goes back in time. Illustrated by
Rob Reger.
Resnick, Mike The Chronicles of
Lucifer Jones: Volume 1: 1922-
1926: Adventures (Arc Manor/
Phoenix Pick 978-1-61242-034-9,
$7.99, 192pp, tp) Reprint (Signet
1985) SF fix-up novel/collection of
12 stories featuring the adventurer/
preacher Lucifer Jones. Resnick provides
a new introduction. A print-ondemand
edition. Arc Manor, PO Box
10339, Rockville MD 20849-0339;
.
Resnick, Mike, ed. Bug - Eyed
Monsters and Bimbos (Arc Manor/
Phoenix Pick 978-1-61242-032-5,
$16.00, 266pp, tp) Reprint (Nolacon
Press 1988 as Shaggy B.E.M.
Stories) Worldcon anthology of 30
parody stories. This adds one poem,
and a new introduction by Resnick. A
print-on-demand edition. Arc Manor,
PO Box 10339, Rockville MD 20849-
0339; .
* Resnick, Mike, ed. Reboots (Arc
Manor/Phoenix Pick 978-1-61242-
049-3, $6.99, 160pp, tp) Original
anthology of two stories by Mercedes
Lackey and Cody Martin, set in a
world where spaceships are crewed
by zombies and vampires. This is the
second volume in the Stellar Guild
series, which combines one original
novella by a major author, plus a novelette
set in the same world, written
by a ‘‘protégé’’ chosen by the first author.
Lackey provides the introduction
to Martin’s story. A print-on-demand
edition. Arc Manor, PO Box 10339,
Rockville MD 20849-0339; .
* Resnick, Mike, ed. Tau Ceti (Arc
Manor/Phoenix Pick 978-1-61242-
047-9, $7.99, 202pp, tp) Original
anthology of two SF stories by Kevin
J. Anderson and Steven Savile. This
is the first volume in the Stellar Guild
series, which combines one original
novella by a major author, plus a novelette
set in the same world, written
by a ‘‘protégé’’ chosen by the first author.
A print-on-demand edition. Arc
Manor, PO Box 10339, Rockville MD
20849-0339; .
* Reynolds, Anthony Warhammer
40,000: Word Bearers (Black Library
US 978-1-84970-105-1, $15.00,
766pp, tp, cover by Clint Langley)
Omnibus of three gaming tie-in
novels in the series: Dark Apostle
(2007), Dark Disciple (2008), and
Dark Creed (2010), plus a new story.
Copyrighted by Games Workshop.
Simultaneous with the Black Library
UK edition.
* Robertson, Linda Wicked Circle
(Pocket/Juno Books 978-1-4516-
4695-5, $7.99, 413pp, pb, cover by
Don Sipley) Paranormal romance,
fifth in the Circle series.
* Rosenberg, Aaron No Small Bills
(Clockworks/Crazy 8 Press 978-
1-892544-30-8, $12.99, 337pp,
tp, cover by Aaron Rosenberg) SF
novel. The aliens who gave DuckBob
Spinowitz his duck head are back and
want his help. An e-book version was
released 9/11.
* Rowen, Michelle That Old Black
Magic (Berkley Sensation 978-
0-425-24493-7, $7.99, 304pp, pb)
Paranormal romance novel, third in
the Living in Eden series. Copyrighted
by Michelle Rouillard.
* Rowen, Michelle & Richelle Mead
Vampire Academy: The Ultimate
Guide (Penguin/Razorbill 978-1-
59514-451-5, $9.99, 305pp, tp)
Young-adult non-fiction, a guide to
Mead’s Vampire Academy series.
Includes an unpaginated, 16-page
full-color section of manga art, photos,
and more.
Saberhagen, Joan Spicci & Robert E.
Vardeman, eds. Golden Reflections
(Baen 978-1-4516-3774-8, $7.99,
636pp, pb, cover by Bob Eggleton)
Reprint (Baen 2011) original anthology
of Fred Saberhagen’s SF novel
The Mask of the Sun (Ace 1979)
plus seven stories it inspired from
other authors.
Sampson, Jeff Vesper (Harper-
Collins/Balzer + Bray 978-0-06-
199277-3, $8.99, 292pp, tp, cover
by Ali Smith) Reprint (Balzer + Bray
2011) young-adult dark fantasy novel.
Schreiber, Ellen Once in a Full Moon
(HarperCollins/Tegen Books 978-
0-06-198652-9, $8.99, 292pp, tp)
Reprint (Tegen Books 2011) youngadult
werewolf romance novel, the
first in a series.
Scott, Elizabeth Grace (Penguin/
Speak 978-0-14-241975-5, $7.99,
210pp, tp) Reprint (Dutton 2010)
young-adult dystopian SF novel about
a girl raised to be a suicide bomber.
* Sebold, Gaie Babylon Steel
(Rebellion/Solaris US 978-1-907992-
38-4, $7.99, 543pp, pb, cover by
Marek Okon) Fantasy novel, the
first book in a series. Ex-mercenary
Babylon Steel, desperate for money
to keep her brothel running, takes a
job hunting for a missing heiress. A
first novel.
* Sehestedt, Mark Forgotten
Realms: Cry of the Ghost Wolf
(Wizards of the Coast 978-0-7869-
5847-4, $7.99, 311pp, pb, cover by
Jaime Jones) Novelization based
on the roleplaying game, third in
the Chosen of Nendawen series.
Copyrighted by Wizards of the Coast.
Selfors, Suzanne Mad Love
(Bloomsbury/Walker US 978-0-8027-
2354-3, $9.99, 323pp, tp) Reprint
(Walker US 2011) young-adult novel
with possible fantasy elements.
* Selzer, Adam Extraordinary
(Random House/Delacorte 978-0-
385-73649-7, $15.99, 324pp, hc, cover
by Michael S. Heath) Young-adult
fantasy novel, subtitled: The True
Story of My Fairygodparent, Who
Almost Killed Me, and Certainly
Never Made Me a Princess. Jennifer
sets the record straight after a bestselling
book says she was helped by
her fairy godfather.
* Shields, Charles J. And So It Goes:
Kurt Vonnegut: A Life (Macmillan/
Henry Holt 978-0-8050-8693-5,
$30.00, 513pp, hc) Biography.
Includes two unpaginated, eightpage
sections of b&w photos, notes,
bibliography, and an index.
* Simonsen, Mary Lydon Mr. Darcy’s
Bite (Sourcebooks 978-1-4022-
5077-4, $14.99, 323pp, tp) Literary
pastiche/paranormal romance novel
of werewolves and the characters of
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
* Singh, Nalini Lord of the Abyss &
Desert Warrior (Harlequin/Nocturne
978-0-373-83775-5, $6.99, 493pp,
pb) Omnibus of two romance novels:
paranormal romance Lord of the
Abyss (2011) and Desert Warrior
(2003).
* Snyder, Lucy A. Switchblade
Goddess (Ballantine Del Rey 978-
0-345-51211-6, $7.99, 323pp, pb,
cover by Dan Dos Santos) Urban
fantasy novel, third in the series featuring
Jessie Shimmer. Jessie’s battle
against the demon/death goddess
Miko continues.
* Snyder, Maria V. Touch of Power
(Harlequin/Mira 978-0-7783-1307-6,
$14.95, 390pp, tp) Fantasy romance
novel, the first book in a series. Avry,
fleeing those who blame healers for
the plague, is captured by a group
of fighters desperate to heal their
prince.
Somper, Justin Vampirates: Empire
of Night (Little Brown 978-0-316-
03323-7, $6.99, 490pp, tp, cover
by Justin Gerard) Reprint (Simon
& Schuster UK 2010) young-adult
post-holocaust vampire pirate novel,
the fifth in a series. We apparently
missed the 8/10 hardcover first US
edition (-03322-0, $15.99).
* Spear, Terry Dreaming of the Wolf
(Sourcebooks Casablanca 978-
1-4022-4555-8, $7.99, 363pp, pb,
cover by Patricia Schmitt) Werewolf
romance, eighth in the series begun
in Heart of the Wolf.
Stasheff, Christopher King Kobold
Revived (Arc Manor/Phoenix Pick
978-1-61242-043-1, $9.99, 196pp,
tp) Reprint (Ace 1984) of the revised
version of King Kobold (Ace 1971),
the second book in the Warlock series.
A print-on-demand edition. Arc
Manor, PO Box 10339, Rockville MD
20849-0339; .
Stasheff, Christopher The Warlock
Unlocked (Arc Manor/Phoenix Pick
978-1-61242-051-6, $9.99, 226pp, tp)
Reprint (Ace 1982) SF/fantasy novel,
third in the Warlock series.
* Stoddard, Jason Winning Mars
(Prime Books 978-1-60701-216-0,
$14.95, 285pp, tp) Near-future SF
novel, expanded from the eponymous
story and revised from a previous
release in pdf form. A TV producer
desperate for a new reality show
puts together a mission to Mars. A
first novel.
* Stolarz, Laurie Faria Deadly Little
Voices (Disney/Hyperion 978-1-
4231-3161-8, $16.99, 343pp, hc,
cover by Sarah Johnson) Young-adult
paranormal romance, the fourth in
the Touch series begun in Deadly
Little Secret.
Stroud, Jonathan The Ring of
Solomon (Disney/Hyperion 978-
1-4231-2404-7, $8.99, 398pp, tp,
cover by Melvyn Grant) Reprint
(Doubleday UK 2010) young-adult
fantasy novel, a standalone prequel
to the previous three books in the
Bartimaeus series.
* Sumner, Gregory D. Unstuck in
Time: A Journey Through Kurt
Vonnegut’s Life and Novels (Seven
Stories Press 978-1-60980-349-0,
$24.95, 355pp, hc) Non-fiction, a critical
biography of Vonnegut focusing
on his novels. Includes notes, bibliographic
references, and an index.
Taylor, Travis S. & Les Johnson Back
to the Moon (Baen 978-1-4516-3773-
1, $7.99, 393pp, pb, cover by David
Mattingly) Reprint (Baen 2010) SF
novel.
* Theroux, Alexander T h e
Strange Case of Edward Gorey
(Fantagraphics 978-1-60699-384-
2, $19.99, 166pp, hc) Non-fiction,
biography, rewritten and expanded
from the Fantagraphics 2000 edition.
Includes photos and b&w illustrations
by Gorey. This indicates it is
the second hardcover edition of the
revised edition, but the first (2/11)
was not seen.
Thomas, Jeffrey Beautiful Hell (Dark
Regions Press 978-1-937128-17-3,
$16.95, 118pp, tp, cover by Frank
Walls) Reprint (Corrosion Press 2007
as part of Ugly Heaven, Beautiful
Hell by Carlton Mellick III & Jeffrey
Thomas, not seen) horror novella
set in Thomas’s Hades. The love of
a damned man and a demon is tested
when the Creator decides to intervene
in the rebellion of the damned. A
leatherbound slipcased edition of 26
is sold out. Dark Regions Press, PO
Box 1264, Colusa CA 95932; .
* Thorpe, Gav Warhammer 40,000:
The Horus Heresy: Deliverance
Lost (Black Library US 978-1-84970-
062-7, $8.99, 469pp, pb, cover by Neil
Roberts) Gaming tie-in novel based
on the world of the roleplaying game.
Simultaneous with the Black Library
UK edition. Copyrighted by Games
Workshop.
* Tiernan, Cate Darkness Falls (Little
Brown/Poppy 978-0-316-03593-4,
$17.99, 392pp, hc) Young-adult paranormal
romance, the second book in
the Immortal Beloved trilogy about
immortal girl Nastasya. Copyrighted
by Gabrielle Charbonnet.
Tiernan, Cate Immortal Beloved
(Little Brown/Poppy 978-0-316-
03591-0, $8.99, 407pp, tp) Reprint
(Little, Brown 2010) young-adult
paranormal romance, the first book
in the eponymous trilogy. Copyrighted
by Gabrielle Charbonnet.
�
LOCUS February 2012 / 65

� Books Received
* Tiernan, Cate Sweep, Volume V:
Reckoning, Full Circle, Night’s Child
(Penguin/Speak 978-0-14-242011-9,
$7.99, 189+190+318pp, tp) Omnibus
of three young-adult dark fantasy novels,
the 13th-15th in the series: Sweep:
Reckoning (2002), Sweep: Full
Circle (2002), and Sweep: Night’s
Child (2003). The books are separately
paginated. Copyrighted by 17th
Street Productions and Gabrielle
Charbonnet.
* Tuomala, A.M. Erekos (Candlemark
& Gleam 978-1-936460-03-8, $19.95,
tp, cover by Rhiannon Wright) Fantasy
novel. After a witch raises her sister
from the dead, the king demands she
create an undead army. Originally
published in 2010 as an e-book.
This is a print-on-demand edition.
Candlemark & Gleam, 104 Morgan
St., Bennington VT 05201; .
* Turtledove, Harry Supervolcano:
Eruption (Penguin/Roc 978-0-451-
46420-0, $25.95, 417pp, hc, cover by
Steve Stone) Epic disaster novel, the
first book in the Supervolcano trilogy.
The supervolcano under Yellowstone
National Park erupts.
* Valente, Catherynne M. Myths of
Origin (Wyrm Publishing 978-1-
890464-14-1, $15.95, 501pp, tp, cover
by Jeffrey Smith) Omnibus of four short
novels: The Labyrinth (2004), Yume
No Hon: The Book of Dreams (2005),
The Grass-Cutting Sword (2006),
and Under in the Mere (2009, not
seen). Valente provides notes on the
origins of each. Introduction by Jeff
VanderMeer. Wyrm Publishing, .
Short Fiction: Gardner Dozois
� p. 14
one-volume library in itself. The literary quality of
the stories is on the whole quite high as well. There
are too many good stories contained here to make
anything like a complete list, but among the best
are ‘‘The Country of the Kind’’ by Damon Knight,
‘‘The Game of Rat and Dragon’’ by Cordwainer
Smith, ‘‘Fondly Fahrenheit’’ by Alfred Bester,
‘‘The Green Hills of Earth’’ by Robert A. Heinlein,
‘‘Souls’’ by Joanna Russ, ‘‘Driftglass’’ by Samuel
R. Delany, ‘‘Bloodchild’’ by Octavia Butler, ‘‘The
Golden Horn’’ by Edgar Pangborn, ‘‘Bears Discover
Fire’’ by Terry Bisson, ‘‘Rachel in Love’’ by
Pat Murphy, ‘‘Think Like a Dinosaur’’ by James
Patrick Kelly, ‘‘Seven American Nights’’ by Gene
66 / LOCUS February 2012
Vonnegut, Kurt While Mortals Sleep
(Random House/Dial Press 978-0-
385-34374-9, $16.00, xii + 255pp,
tp, cover by Kurt Vonnegut) Reprint
(Delacorte 2011) associational collection
of 16 mostly mainstream trunk stories.
Illustrated by the author. Foreword
by Dave Eggers.
Walton, Jo Among Others (Tor 978-0-
7653-3172-4, $14.99, 302pp, tp, cover
by Kamil Vojnar) Reprint (Tor 2011)
fantasy novel.
* Waters, Elisabeth, ed. Marion
Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and
Sorceress XXVI (Norilana Books
978-1-60762-096-9, $13.95, 315pp,
tp) Original anthology of 19 fantasy
stories. Authors include Dave Smeds,
Deborah J. Ross, and K.D. Wentworth.
Copyrighted by the Marion Zimmer
Bradley Literary Works Trust. A printon-demand
edition.
+ Weatherly, L.A. Angel Fire
(Candlewick Press 978-0-7636-5679-
9, $17.99, 638pp, hc, cover by Heather
Landis) Young-adult paranormal romance,
the second book in a trilogy.
Willow and Alex flee to Mexico City.
First US edition (Usborne 10/11).
* Weeks, Brent Perfect Shadow
(Subterranean Press 978-1-59606-
415-7, $45.00, 99pp, hc, cover by
Raymond Swanland) Fantasy novella,
a prequel to the Night Angel trilogy.
This is a leatherbound, signed limited
edition of 1,500; a lettered edition
of 26 ($250.00) is also available.
Subterranean Press, PO Box 190106,
Burton MI 48519; .
* Wells, Jaye Silver-Tongued Devil
(Orbit US 978-0-316-17843-3, $7.99,
405pp, pb, cover by Craig White) Urban
�
fantasy novel, the fourth in the Vampire
Mage Wars series featuring half-mage,
half-vampire assassin Sabina Kane.
Simultaneous with the Orbit UK edition.
* Wells, Martha The Serpent Sea
(Night Shade Books 978-1-59780-332-
8, $14.99, 340pp, tp, cover by Steve
Argyle) Fantasy novel. Second in the
Books of the Raksura series begun in
The Cloud Roads.
* Whates, Ian City of Light & Shadow
(Angry Robot US 978-0-85766-190-
6, $7.99, 394pp, pb, cover by Greg
Bridges) Fantasy novel, the third
volume in the City of a Hundred Rows
series begun in City of Dreams &
Nightmare. Simultaneous with the UK
(Angry Robot) edition.
* Whiddon, Karen Wolf Whisperer
(Harlequin/Nocturne 978-0-373-
61875-0, $5.50, 281pp, pb) Paranormal
romance/werewolf novel in The Pack
series.
* Williamson, Matt, ed. Unstuck #1
(Unstuck Books 978-0-9839751-0-6,
$12.00, 351pp, tp, cover by Timothy
J. Fuss) Original anthology, the first
in an annual series dedicated to ‘‘new
literature of the fantastic, the futuristic,
the surreal, and the strange;’’ this has
21 stories, five poems, and one essay.
Authors include Matthew Vollmer,
Rachel Swirsky, Leslie What, and
Aimee Bender. Illustrated by Matthew
Moditeaux. Unstuck Books, .
* Wright, John C. Count to a Trillion
(Tor 978-0-7653-2927-1, $25.99,
364pp, hc) SF novel, the first series.
A brilliant young man from what used
to be Texas goes mad and comes to
himself centuries later in a seemingly
utopian Earth.
Wolfe, ‘‘The Ugly Chickens’’ by Howard Waldrop,
‘‘The Lincoln Train’’ by Maureen McHugh, and
‘‘Blood Music’’ by Greg Bear, as well as stories by
Michael Swanwick, Bruce Sterling, Jack Vance, L.
Sprague de Camp, Nancy Kress, Nalo Hopkinson,
Ted Chiang, Pat Cadigan, Cory Doctorow, Connie
Willis, Karen Joy Fowler, Kim Stanley Robinson,
and many others.
One caveat: the type here is very small, so you
may have trouble reading this if your eyes are
weak, or if you don’t own a magnifying glass.
You won’t find this in most bookstores, so if you
want it, either order it direct from Wildside Press
or from Amazon.
The November Clarkesworld, number 62,
is perhaps their strongest issue this year, with
* Zahn, Timothy Cobra Gamble (Baen
978-14516-3769-4, $25.00, 308pp, hc,
cover by David Mattingly) SF novel,
third in the Cobra War trilogy, sequel
to the Cobra trilogy.
* Zettersten, Arne J.R.R. Tolkien’s
Double Worlds and Creative
Process: Language and Life (St.
Martin’s/Palgrave Macmillan 978-0-
230-62314-9, $85.00, 243pp, hc) Nonfiction;
a memoir/biography looking at
Tolkien’s academic career, his interest
in medieval language and literature,
and how they influenced his fiction.
This copy appears to be missing its
front material (title page, copyright,
table of contents, preface). Includes
bibliography and index. A print-ondemand
edition.�
December 2011 Year to Date
SF Novels 23 SF Novels 236
Fantasy Novels 19 Fantasy Novels 415
Horror Novels 9 Horror Novels 156
Paranormal Paranormal
Romance 29 Romance 294
Anthologies 13 Anthologies 155
Collections 3 Collections 114
Reference 3 Reference 26
History/Criticism 3 History/Criticism 46
Media Related 7 Media Related 110
Young Adult 18 Young Adult 486
SF 2 SF 72
Fantasy 4 Fantasy 241
Horror 1 Horror 65
Paranormal Paranormal
Romance 11 Romance 107
Other 0 Other 1
Omnibus 9 Omnibus 70
Art/Humor 4 Art/Humor 41
Miscellaneous 9 Miscellaneous 86
Total New: 149 Total New: 2,236
Reprints & Reprints &
Reissues: 69 Reissues: 940
Total: 218 Total: 3,176
two very good stories: ‘‘The Smell of Orange
Groves’’ by Lavie Tidhar, a study of the machine-augmented
persistence of memory across
generations, set against a bizarre, vividly portrayed
future Tel Aviv, and ‘‘a Militant Peace’’
by David Klecha & Tobias S. Buckell, a compelling
look at an unusual high-tech, non-violent
invasion of North Korea.
Tor.com closes out 2011 with two relatively
minor but entertaining stories: the Damon Runyon
pastiche ‘‘a Clean Sweep with all the
Trimmings’’ by James alan Gardner, and the
vaguely Holiday-themed ‘‘If Dragon’s Mass
Eve Be Cold and Clear’’ by Ken Scholes.
–Gardner Dozois �
Short Fiction: Rich Horton
� p. 15 � in February. ‘‘Murder Born’’ by Robert Reed
posits a (highly implausible!) new form of execu-
is about a starship crew arriving at an apparently
uninhabited planet, and their response to
tion – when a convicted murderer is executed, his both the terribly out of date orders from back
it, and where they ended up; it wraps up with the or her victims are resurrected at the place of their on Earth, as well as the stunning discovery of
realization that there were other key players along. death (but at the present time). The story is told a very different form of life on the new planet.
It’s a story of political promises and betrayal, of by a photographer whose daughter was brutally The life form described is SFnally fascinating,
different sorts of oppression, of loyalty and family, murdered. He becomes sort of an official photog- and the message about the reaction to the Earth
and it’s a deeply science fictional story as well. rapher of the resurrected, and even falls in love news and orders is well enough done, if just a
with a resurrected murder victim from back in the bit obvious.
Lightspeed’s December issue is highlighted by ’60s. There are plenty of pitfalls, of course, most
Vylar Kaftan’s ‘‘The Sighted Watchmaker’’, especially when someone is executed and their alec Nevala-Lee again shows his range with
a far future story featuring a lonely intelligence alleged victim does not reappear. It’s a thoughtful ‘‘Ernesto’’, from the March Analog, which
wondering about its makers – especially once it and thought-provoking story, with a mild twist to takes us to the Spanish Civil War, where Ernest
finds one – and trying to create intelligence in the end, wrapped around a (fairly predictable, for Hemingway witnesses a church in which miracu-
its turn. The story manages to portray deep time the most part) mystery about the murder of the lous cures seem to have occurred. This turns out
nicely, and to ask us to think about the nature of protagonist’s daughter.
to be a political problem as well as a religious (or
intelligence and responsibility.
I also liked ‘‘The People of Pele’’ by Ken Liu, scientific?) question, and the story lays out the
a writer who is appearing everywhere these days political background effectively while giving a
Asimov’s publishes another first rate novella it seems, with a lot of impressive work. This story nice SFnal treatment of the miracles.

As I’ve noted before, the literary magazine
Conjunctions has a history of engagement with
the fantastic. The theme of the latest issue, #57,
is kin. It includes a nice Elizabeth Hand story,
‘‘Uncle Lou’’, about Nina and her raffish uncle,
with whom she’s had a good relationship for a long
time. He’s getting old now, and a last invitation
reaches her, to accompany him to a party at the
zoo. We gather quickly enough where this is going
– what we and Nina will learn about Lou – so
there aren’t really any surprises here, but what
matters is the grace of the telling.
Hand also appears in the anthology a Book of
Horrors, with a strong novella, ‘‘Near Zennor’’.
The protagonist, an architect named Jeffrey, has
lost his wife suddenly, and while going through
her stuff finds some letters she wrote to a children’s
author as a teen. Intrigued by a mystery
from her past, he travels to the author’s old place,
near Zennor in Cornwall. It turns out this writer,
whose children’s fantasies were odd and very dark,
had been accused of child molestation. Jeffrey’s
wife and some of her friends had tried to visit the
man, and one of them later disappeared. All this
points in a disquieting direction, but Jeffrey’s
visit reveals something quite different, terrifying
(and sad) in another way entirely. Again Hand’s
prose – and its balance and control – is a delight,
as is her depiction of place, and here, too, a well
portrayed central event.
Finally, I should mention a nice piece from a
somewhat obscure venue: a long novelette called
‘‘Lune and the Red Empress’’ by Liz Williams
& alastair Reynolds, from the 2011 Eastercon
souvenir book. It’s set in Paris in the very far future,
with the world freezing, maintained only by the use
of power obtained from certain mysterious ‘‘eggs.’’
Lune is a thief, and at her mistress’s behest she is
Faren Miller
� p. 19
�
any genre she may turn to, with startling language,
themes, and settings.
The sites here include Elfland, Electric Squidland,
an unsettling Victorian séance, and a world where
no one sleeps, at lengths ranging from single-pager
to substantial novelette. The work that gave the
collection its title (shortened from ‘‘Somewhere
Russell Letson
� p. 21
�
is also the key phrase of the show’s theme song).
He fetches up in a commune where social harmony
depends on having a headful of embedded wiring
and circuitry and utter emotional transparency. In
the decades that follow, he sets up the Carousel,
gives shows for the wireheads, conceals the fact
that his jacked-up transhuman metabolism ate the
communal circuitry they installed, and continues
to look for ways out of his indefinitely-prolonged
childhood.
The story is filled with – driven by – examples of
quasi-intelligent, semi-autonomous, self-organizing
technology. Much of it is profoundly useful and
beneficial, such as adaptive clothing or the selfassembling
buildings that understand ‘‘the disci-
Adrienne Martini
� p. 23
�
Satori’s designers breaks free of the compound
and sets up camp in the heartland, Doss is sent
to investigate – and her investigations get messy
quickly.
stealing an egg from the Cathedral. Her mistress
claims to be a sort of Robin Hood, using these
eggs for the poor, but when Lune is kidnapped by
a rival she hears a different story. It’s colorful stuff,
with zeppelins and far-future tech and a certain
Dying Earth vibe – along with wild cosmological
speculation.
Recommended Stories:
‘‘Scattered Along the River of Heaven’’,
Aliette de Bodard (Clarkesworld, 1/12)
‘‘Time, Like Blood, on My Hands’’,
Eric Del Carlo (Redstone, 12/11)
‘‘Near Zennor’’, Elizabeth Hand
(a Book of Horrors)
‘‘Silvergrass Mirror’’, Amanda M. Hayes (Abyss
& Apex Fourth Quarter 2011)
‘‘The Sighted Watchmaker’’, Vylar Kaftan
(Lightspeed 12/11)
‘‘The People of Pele’’, Ken Liu
(Asimov’s 2/12)
‘‘Heartless’’, Peadar Ó Guilín
(Beneath Ceaseless Skies 12/15/11)
‘‘Murder Born’’, Robert Reed (Asimov’s 2/12)
‘‘The Smell of Orange Groves’’, Lavie Tidhar
(Clarkesworld 11/11)
‘‘Lune and the Red Empress’’,
Liz Williams & Alastair Reynolds
(Eastercon Souvenir Book)
–Rich Horton
Semiprofessional magazines, fiction fanzines,
original collections, original anthologies, plus
new stories in outside sources should be sent to
Rich Horton, 653 Yeddo Ave., Webster Groves MO
63119, , for review.�
Beneath Those Waves Was Her Home’’) features
a small New England town’s museum of naval
artifacts, one room devoted to old wooden figureheads
from ships. This roadside attraction draws
in a narrator whose jaded, somewhat distracted
viewpoint alternates with that of a transformed
selkie trapped in our world. Unlike the graceful
maiden of the book’s cover art, this unwilling human
has ‘‘velvet-short hair’’ and the vocabulary of
a punk (‘‘It would’ve been nice if the artist fucked
plinary needs of the researchers... to come up with
an optimal geometry for clustering research across
disciplines.’’ Of course, nobody but the scientists
can understand the complex, ‘‘since the bubbles
moved themselves around all the time as they
sought new, higher levels of optimal configuration.’’
So it goes with technologies that have literal minds
of their own, or (worse) are amenable to hacking,
redesign, and repurposing, and that keep returning
to bite everybody on the ass. And that is what happens
when the future comes calling yet again with
somebody else’s hegemonic vision of perfection,
in the form of much-evolved, truly omnivorous
wumpuses, and Jimmy is displaced even farther
into a future that is not all that Beautiful, if beauty
means autonomy.
The non-fiction part of the Outspoken package
consists of Doctorow’s 2010 Worldcon speech,
Like Paolo Bacigalupi, Zeigler creates hard
worlds and beautiful fiction. Seed will stay with
you longer than you might hope.
Lake Woebegotten is one weird-ass town. First
it was inundated by zombies; now it’s Ground
Zero for a vampire clan.
as pretty as he talks’’).
In Bringing Up Baby, after being jailed along
with the paleontologist and other hapless souls – including
her aristocratic aunt – Hepburn’s character
decides to play to the cops’ misconceptions, adopting
the persona of a tough-talking dame in a (filmic)
gang of thieves. Despite the grand cheekbones, she
knows the stance and the lingo. There’s some of that
divine mischief in Sarah Monette.
–Faren Miller �
‘‘Creativity vs. Copyright’’, in which Cory the
Polemicist (familiar to any reader of Boing Boing or
this magazine) makes the case against digital rights
management and associated efforts on the part of
middlemen to monetize access to the work of actual
creators. In the interview with series editor Terry
Bisson, the discussion ranges from the inspiration
for the creation of Boing Boing to WikiLeaks and
governmental transparency to his writing regimen
to how his fiction and non-fiction fit together into
a ‘‘project’’ that deals with ‘‘technology and liberation.’’
I am still trying to reconcile the generally
optimistic polemicist-essayist and the much more
ironic story-teller whose future consists of wonderful,
exhilarating nightmares.
–Russell Letson �
The true weirdness, however, springs from its
residents rather than its invaders: Everyone who
lives there is above average on the off-center
scale.
In The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten, Bonnie
Greyduck, a pretty 17-year old with a Very
�
LOCUS February 2012 / 67

� Adrienne Martini tended to stand alone. The most frustrating part of
Important Secret, moves from Santa Cruz to the
small Minnesotan town. She falls for Edwin, a
very pale and very handsome boy in her biology
class. Readers of Meyer’s Twilight saga – or anyone
who has been even marginally aware of pop
culture over the last half-decade – can imagine
what happens next. Girl meets Boy, Boy turns
out to be undead (but only feeds on animals so
that’s OK), Girl is a psychopath and/or sociopath
who has killed before, Girl chases Boy away,
Boy comes back, Another Boy turns up, Boy is
conflicted, Another Boy pines, and there’s a Big
Finish involving Gallons of Blood.
Geillor navigates the boundaries between
weightless parody and weighty storytelling with
seeming ease and irreverent glee. Here the author
grinds together both Meyer and Keillor and
comes up with a sausage that is tastier than the
sum of its ingredients. At times, the tale feels like
a mercifully less dense version of Stephen King's
Under the Dome. There are even moments of
pure post-modern intellectual noodling involving
the narrator that make it clear that Geillor,
whomever he or she may be, really knows what
he or she is doing.
Perhaps one of the most important details to
point out about Marissa Meyer’s Cinder is that it
is the first book in what should be a four-book series,
which won’t wrap up until 2015. Will we still
even read books then or simply have them directly
transferred to our brains?
Still, it’s good to know that Cinder isn’t in-
Stefan Dziemianowicz
� p. 25
ing the Nazi takeover of their country, epitomized
by a pursuing Nazi destroyer whose zealous captain
is determined to prevent their escape. It’s the book’s
most action-packed tale, and one of those Davidand-Goliath-type
stories in which a ploy involving
guerilla ingenuity from the outmatched good guys
allows them to triumph over the technologicallysophisticated-but-overconfident
bad guys. The story
is interesting as much for what Michael doesn’t do
in it as for what he does do, and it calls to mind
McCammon’s recent historical novels featuring
Revolutionary-Era detective Matthew Corbett,
which evoke the supernatural without explicitly
deploying it.
Much of the appeal of these stories derives from
their believable grounding in historical detail and
their colorful settings. ‘‘The Wolf and the Eagle’’
is set in North Africa, and serves as a sidebar to a
mission recalled in The Wolf’s Hour where Michael
is instrumental in foiling Rommel’s plans to
take control of the Suez Canal. Captured by a Nazi
fighter pilot who shot him out of the sky, Michael
wages a war of wills on two levels, scheming how
to escape his captor and also trying to determine the
most opportune moment to unleash his lycanthropic
powers when the two are threatened by a formidable
mutual enemy. The book’s longest story, ‘‘The
Room at the Bottom of the Stairs’’, is set shortly
after the events of The Wolf’s Hour, in a Germany
where the collapse of the Third Reich is imminent.
Impersonating a Nazi officer, Michael insinuates
himself into the company of a female spy whom, to
his surprise, he falls in love with. The story unfolds
as a bittersweet romance, and belatedly introduces
a Nazi plan to win the war – dubbed ‘‘The Black
Sun’’ – much as The Wolf’s Hour had Michael
trying to stop Operation Iron Fist, a top-secret
Nazi military maneuver that threatened to thwart
68 / LOCUS February 2012
�
Meyer’s story is how it fails to wrap itself up by
the last page. Yes, there is a small sense of closure
here, but it fails to satisfy.
What that speaks to is not a defective story but
rather how engaging Meyer’s re-imagining of
Cinderella is. She’s created characters with meat
and moxie – and we want to know what will happen
to them next.
Cinder is a teenager in the far off future, where
the Earth’s many people have banded together in
the face of a larger threat from the Lunars, who
use ‘‘magic’’ in order to control how they are perceived,
and from the Letumosis, a plague-like disease
currently ravaging the population. Because
of injuries received when she was younger, Cinder
is a cyborg and, therefore, less than human.
All of the trappings of the folk tale are here,
if slightly disguised. There is a handsome prince.
Ditto evil stepmother and sister and pumpkin
coach. But so much more has been added around
the traditional story’s outline. The little details in
Cinder are what make the threadbare story come
alive. Plus, Cinder can take care of herself, thank
you very much. The prince is less cypher and
more actor. And Meyer has interwoven interesting
ideas about what makes one human while briskly
moving the story along.
There is no denying, however, that this is a book
for younger readers. A few of the twists are easy
to spot from the first few chapters if you have
more reading experience under your belt, but even
with those moments of unsurprise, the story itself
remains intriguing. I can’t wait to see what comes
next.
the D-Day invasion.
The collection ends with a valedictory tale,
‘‘Death of a Hunter’’, which doesn’t quite play out
as its title suggests. It holds open the possibility of
future adventures for Michael Gallatin, and an interesting
new direction for them. The Hunter from
the Woods is not the book to introduce readers to
McCammon’s writing, but it will please anyone
who enjoyed The Wolf’s Hour or McCammon’s
other works of historical fiction.
In ‘‘Riding with the Dead’’, his introduction to
the collection of three unproduced screenplays
titled Shadows West, Joe R. Lansdale takes credit
for popularizing the ‘‘weird western’’ through his
short novel Dead in the West (1986), which he
adapted as one of these scripts over a decade ago. In
fact, Lansdale is the leading exponent of the form.
For those not familiar with it, the weird western is a
traditional period western story infused with horror
and the supernatural. The larger-than-life characters
we associate with the wild-west story – gunslingers,
both heroic and villainous, male and female – are
a staple of the weird western, as are the myths and
folklore that give the wild-west story its tall-tale
character. In the weird western, the fantastic usually
takes the form of horrible monsters conjured
by Indian curses, or the reanimated corpses of
the dead that are so abundant in a time and place
where guns are so ubiquitous. In Lansdale’s weird
westerns, extravagant gore leavened by raunchy
humor is a virtual trademark.
The screenplay for ‘‘Dead in the West’’, which
appears last in the book, is the most interesting of
the three. Its anti-hero protagonist, one of Lansdale’s
best, is Jebidiah Mercer, a disgraced preacher
guilt-ridden over the murder of a lover by her jealous
husband, whom Jebidiah gunned down in selfdefense.
A self-admitted sinner, Jebidiah has burned
his church and wanders the Wild West, preaching
Scripture and using his .36 Navy revolver to drive
The Best of Kage Baker makes me mad – not
in a ‘‘reading this was a waste of time’’ way but
in a ‘‘she had so many stories left’’ way. My anger
is purely selfish.
While the bulk of the stories collected here
have turned up in other publications and online,
it is lovely to have these 20 tales under one cover,
even though most have been anthologized before.
Best contains a slice or two from each of Baker’s
worlds. The Company is well represented, as is
her House of the Stag universe, her take on a future
Mars and the proto-Company world of Nell
Gwynne. Plus, there are stories that are outliers,
like ‘‘Plotters and Shooters’’, which is about adolescent
power dynamics and meteors. The last
few stories, ‘‘The Ruby Incomparable,’’ ‘‘Bad
Machine,’’ and the heartbreaking ‘‘The Carpet
Beds of Sutro Park’’ show the writer that Baker
was becoming, one full of both melancholy and
wit.
One could quibble about these particular 20
stories representing the best of what Baker had
to offer – but that is the sort of argument that
revolves around almost any best of anthology
for any writer. What would have been helpful
to have, however, is a more informative table
of contents, one that gives the reader a sense of
when and where the bulk of the stories were published,
if only to provide a better outline of how
Baker was developing as a writer.
Still, The Best of Kage Baker is nice to have,
even if it also limns what could have been.
–Adrienne Martini �
home his message. (‘‘Devil brings a sword and I
bring a sword back to him,’’ is the way he justifies
it.) His arrival at the east Texas town of Mud Creek
catalyzes a curse placed on it by an Indian lynched
for his accused complicity in the death of a young
boy, and sooner than you can say ‘‘Draw,’’ Jebidiah
and a ragtag crew of locals find themselves fighting
off an onslaught of the risen dead.
Screenplays can’t be read fairly as fiction – they
are full of cues that distract from smooth narrative
flow and they tend to leave to cinematic visuals
what fiction writers would otherwise try to conjure
through evocative or atmospheric prose. That said,
Lansdale does devote attention to describing his
characters in ways that read much more colorfully
on the printed page than the usual screenplay
shorthand. Of one lunkhead character, he writes,
‘‘He doesn’t look smart enough to outwit his
dinner.’’ A seedy and unkempt innkeeper ‘‘looks
like he could grow penicillin under his arms.’’ A
decomposing zombie looks ‘‘as if he is made of
oatmeal and Gummy Bears.’’ There are even funnier
descriptions that editorial modesty prevents
my quoting here.
‘‘Deadman’s Road’’, the book’s second screenplay,
is co-adapted from a story by Lansdale’s
brother, John. It features one of Lansdale’s
creepiest monsters, a hulking brute of a resurrected
corpse, named Gimet, with a throbbing beehive for
a heart. In life, Gimet was a beekeeper who was
cursed by an Indian squaw for killing her child.
His appearance is always presaged by the arrival
of a few errant, stinging bees, or by an increasingly
loud hum heard off-screen – foreshadowings that
would create marvelous suspense on film.
‘‘Hell’s Bounty’’, another co-written screenplay
that John Lansdale is turning into a novel, is the
closest the Lansdale boys have come to scripting
a spaghetti western. Its hero is a dynamite-toting
outlaw, named Smith, who rode with Quantrill’s
Raiders during the Civil War and who blows him-

self to hell – literally – shortly after he appears
onscreen. Hell, in this tale (as would be expected
in a gonzo Lansdale western), is a spiffy saloon
and Satan is a nattily attired bartender who offers
Smith a chance for a brief return to life to
throw down on Zelzarda, an uppity lesser demon
who’s trying to usurp his superior’s control by
unleashing Lovecraftian monsters into our world.
Conveniently, Zelzarda takes as his human avatar
Trumbo Quill, a miner in the Wyoming Territory
whom Smith has already had a dust-up with. Before
the screenplay ends, Quill rides at the head of an
army of zombie-like ghouls against Smith and his
small posse of resurrected celebrity gunslingers.
If these screenplays have any shortcoming, it’s
Carolyn Cushman
� p. 27
Divers Hands
� p. 29
�
�
off, and as they travel she begins to care for them,
in particular their obnoxious leader – but what
they ask will kill her. And how can she tell if their
prince is any better than the other would-be rulers
battling over the remnants of civilization? This is
rather generic fantasy, but the entertaining mix of
adventure, romance, and magic mystery (What
did cause the plague? What do the strange flowers
called Death Lilies have to do with it all?) makes
for a highly engaging start to a new series.
Brenna Yovanoff, The Space Between (Razorbill
978-1-59514-339-6, $17.99, 363pp, hc) November
2011. Cover by Nekro.
Daphne, daughter of Lilith and Lucifer, leaves
Hell to search for her missing brother on Earth,
and finds the human world is stranger than she expected
in this unsettling young-adult fantasy novel.
Daphne has always considered herself above her
fans and enemies in almost equal measure. The
forces of darkness – literally those allied with
night – have plans to control the Abarat once and
for all, and Candy throws those plans into peril.
Foes include the magician Kaspar Wolfswinkel
(who must draw on the power of magicians he’s
slain by wearing their many-colored hats), the
inventor and leader of Commexo City Rojo Pixler,
and, most villainous of all, the Carrion family
from the island of Gorgossium, or midnight. While
Christopher Carrion is Candy’s main foe in the
first two books, it’s his mother, known as Mater
Motley, who is the darkest threat and who takes
center stage as absolute Midnight begins, her son
having been (possibly) killed when the Abarat’s sea
flooded Chickentown in the key confrontation of
the second book.
The first half of absolute Midnight, as befits
a middle installment, is concerned primarily with
playing out the consequences of the events of the
book before. Candy has discovered that for her
entire life she has shared her body with the con-
Graham Sleight
� p. 30 � often embedded in these stories. The most visible
example of that is ‘‘Aye, and Gomorrah...’’, whose
from a point of view: suggesting that there’s no such
thing as an impartial point of view.
This collected stories volume also underlines a
sense of Delany as someone for whom a central
technique is collage. Many of these stories were
written during years when Delany was travelling
widely, and impressions of the places he visited are
the similarity of their plots. After initial scenes
that set up their stories, all turn into gorefests
that pit revolting zombie armies against badly
outnumbered groups of desperate good guys (and
gals). Nevertheless, what doesn’t work well on the
printed page would likely work fine on screen,
where the formulaic is almost a given. Each of
these screenplays would make a movie more exciting
than the best-known recent weird western film,
Jonah Hex, and at considerably smaller budgets.
If the Wild West had grindhouse theaters or drivein
movie screens, cinematic realizations of these
three screenplays would be a perfect triple-feature.
–Stefan Dziemianowicz �
sisters, who spend their time as succubi on Earth,
so has never visited before, but she has a clue – a
half-fallen-angel boy her brother was helping just
before he disappeared. So Daphne tracks down
Truman, who like most his kind is on a fast road to
self destruction. She manages to get him to help her
in her search – only to realize the Angel of Death
is targeting her sisters, and she’s in danger herself.
Daphne gets by a little too easily on Earth for
someone as ignorant as she’s supposed to be, and I
found the happy ending a little too easy, but for the
most part this is a tale full of wonderful weirdness,
with some deliciously strange developments – most
notably a very strange baby. Yovanoff has a knack
for taking familiar elements, and giving them distinctively
odd, yet intriguingly logical, twists that
make even ordinarly encounters entertaining – and
Daphne herself, despite displaying many typical
symptoms of an unhappy adolescent, is never
remotely ordinary.
–Carolyn Cushman�
sciousness of Princess Boa, the Abarat’s last great
hope to reconcile night and day. She and Malingo
visit powerful witch Laguna Munn for help severing
her tie with Boa. Once Princess Boa is forced
out it becomes clear that she isn’t Christopher
Carrion’s lost love for nothing – she shares more
in common with the likes of Mater Motley than
with Candy, who she immediately tries to kill to
put skin on her bones. Meanwhile, Mater Motley
is creating an army of stitchlings and preparing to
follow through on her son’s plans to create absolute
midnight, a darkness to blot out every light in the
sky, by hatching sacbrood. During the darkness,
she will kill her enemies, leaving no foes to stand
in her way. Back in Chickentown, Candy’s father is
seduced by the deceased Wolfswinkel’s hats, which
turn him into a dark religious figure, determined to
destroy his own daughter. There is also a romantic
storyline introduced for Candy, unfortunately the
weakest and least developed part of a generally
strong story. Here’s hoping that the relationship
gets more attention as it continues. All of these
elements build to a climax that ultimately leaves
Candy and her companions in truly unexplored
territory.
globetrotting story feels now like a prefiguration of
cyberpunk. But it’s true of plenty of other stories
too: one is granted sight of New York’s towers or
boats bobbing in a harbour, and one has the sense
that these are sense-impressions Delany wanted to
fix in fictional form.
I don’t think any writer in SF has more fully
explained the theoretical concerns behind their
June 17 – July 27, 2012
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instructors
Clarion West
Writers Workshop
Mary Rosenblum
Hiromi Goto
George R.R. Martin
Connie Willis
Kelly Link & Gavin Grant
Chuck Palahniuk
2012 Susan C. Petrey Fellow
Scholarships available. Minorities and special
needs students encouraged to apply. For
more information, visit our website.
Clarion West
P. O. Box 31264
Seattle, Washington 98103
206-322-0983
www.clarionwest.org
The main pleasure here is in the world-building.
Barker revels in the richness of his creation, and
if that sometimes slows the pacing, it’s hard to
fault the impulse. The world he’s created is the
perfect home for his manifold races and lands,
half-grotesques, half-wonders, showcased in the
bold lines and rich colors of the accompanying
paintings. When these books first began to appear,
young adult fiction was just beginning to
experience its rise in the marketplace, and Barker’s
books quickly became bestsellers and landed on
recommended lists. They were among the earliest
titles prefiguring the now well-established turn
toward more heavily illustrated stories for young
adults and toward sprawling fantasy epics updated
with a modern twist. These are probably as popular
with Barker’s adult fans as with younger readers
and certainly there are now many more options for
YA readers craving fantasy than ever before. But
Barker’s distinctive imaginative vision continues
to make the Abarat an extremely appealing place
for readers young and old alike to visit.
– Gwenda Bond �
approach than Delany has. Books like The Jewel-
Hinged Jaw (1977) set out in great detail Delany’s
views on the aesthetics of the field, and particularly
on how the fantastic needs to be expressed in language.
In some later works – for instance Triton
or the Return to Nevèrÿon series of fantasy novels
– those theoretical concerns are very close to the
surface. But even without reading Delany’s critical
work, one is strongly aware of a controlling intel-
�
LOCUS February 2012 / 69

� Graham Sleight they might afterwards have trouble believing.) The
ligence behind his fictions, making very deliberate
choices about how they unfold themselves. But
one shouldn’t view Delany as having a static view
of what science fiction should be. His career has
embodied shifts in style and concern as great as
any SF writer.
Nova was the last of the string of novels Delany
published between 1962 and 1968. After that
came a long hiatus, and then the emergence of
Dhalgren (1974). This was a bestseller, a work
that has had influence far beyond the SF field. It’s
also regarded as a famously difficult book, one that
many people have given up on before finishing. My
own approach to it is that one should not expect
conventional narrative pleasures from it, any more
than one should expect a late Picasso painting to
be a naturalistic representation of the world. Dhalgren,
for me, is a work centrally concerned with
conveying a mood, a state of mind, an experience.
One could sum up that experience in various ways:
as dislocation, for instance – as a sense that the
world does not have the kind of rules that it used
to. (In his superb Foreword to the Vintage edition,
William Gibson identifies Dhalgren with the ‘‘city
[that] came to be, in America’’ in the counter-culture
’60s. It existed in no one place or time, but took
its inhabitants through places and experiences that
Haber & Myman
� p. 33
�
Fantasy, Abstract Art, and Concept Art. There are,
of course, categories that are not strictly SFnal:
Architecture, Transport, and Matte Painting.
It’s difficult to pull a few standout images from
among so many great paintings: ‘‘Happy Tree’’ by
Ramses Melendez, Mexico (Fantasy), ‘‘Portrait
of Abyssal Princess’’ by David Ferreira, Portugal
(Fantasy), ‘‘The Arrival of the Sun God’’ by Xiaochen
Fu, China (Game Art), ‘‘Legends of Norrath:
Impetuous Rover’’ by Derek Herring (Game Art),
‘‘Hairstorm’’ by Daria Widermanska-Spala, Poland
(Portrait), ‘‘Zhu Bajie’’ by Feng Wei, China,
(Fantasy), ‘‘Sharkon’’ by Mateusz Ozminski, Poland
(Fantasy), and ‘‘Guild Wars 2: Fire Elemental’’
by Kekai Kotaki, USA (Game Art).
Quibbles? I wish there had been enough space
left for a contents page to list all the categories of
digital work, but at least there’s an artists index.
And while the cover image is lovely, I can’t help
feeling that a more interesting and dynamic image
could have been found amidst the wealth of fabulous
pictures between the covers here.
–Karen Haber
FRaNCESCa MYMaN
Masters of Science Fiction and Fantasy art,
Karen Haber (Rockport 978-1-59253-675-7,
$30.00, 224pp, tp) June 2011.
SHORT TaKE
The Digital Matte Painting Handbook, by David
Mattingly (Wiley, 978-0-470-92242-2, $49.99,
381pp, tp)
People often accuse visual artists of being unable
to talk about their own work. Masters of Science
Fiction and Fantasy art by Karen Haber sets
out to disprove this misconception in a series of
28 in-depth interviews with master and up-andcoming
artists, all of whom prove quite capable of
articulating their own relationship to their art. These
interviews provide a powerful portrait of a vibrant
global art community: individuals at the top of their
70 / LOCUS February 2012
last sentence of the book is incomplete, but seems
to lead back to the first sentence, and there are
many places where the text reflects back, echoes,
or comments on itself. There are, unsurprisingly,
a huge number of literary allusions buried in the
text, most prominently to the work of James Joyce.
Summarising the plot of Dhalgren is, therefore, a
doomed enterprise and I won’t try. But the premise
can at least be set out. Somewhere in the USA is a
city called Bellona, which has suffered an unspecified
catastrophe. The geography of the city is no
longer stable, and a vast sun hangs in the sky. On the
first page, a character we come to know as the Kid
arrives on the outskirts of the city. On one level, the
book can be seen as following his odyssey through
Bellona. But the narrative is far more fragmentary
than that. Certain motifs can be followed: light, as
reflected and refracted through prisms and mirrors;
a notebook journal; the tensions that circle
around the power of Roger Calkins, owner of The
Bellona Times.
One of the sections of the book is entitled Palimpsest,
and this is a pretty clear cue to how Dhalgren
should be approached. The book is overwritten
with commentaries on itself, and so is the city.
The work of revising is never done, and so there’s
no stable way to understand either. A persistent
theme in Delany's work is how the outsider or the
nomad fits into society. I was going to say that the
fields, grappling with the challenges of their careers
and sharing hard-won advice.
Many discuss the opportunities and pitfalls inherent
in confronting a market dominated by new
digital media. Appropriately, the book is divided
into three sections by media, with combined traditional
and digital first, followed by digital-only,
and then traditional-only. The atypical choice to
place digital/traditional combination artists first is
refreshing, and emphasizes the similarities between
the two rather than the divide between them; a slant
which is becoming increasingly common as the
market changes.
The book is a jumbo-size paperback with a
glossy, fold-out poster cover featuring thumbnails
of work from contributing artists, a clean modern
look that allows the lush full-color illustrations to
shine, and a brief foreword by Joe Haldeman. You’ll
recognize many of the names of contributing artists:
Burns, Tan, Picacio, Brom, Lockwood, Martiniere,
Maitz, Nielsen, Gurney, Craft, dos Santos, Vess,
Eggleton, Giancola, etc. Contributors hail from
Australia, China, Serbia, Israel, Poland, Russia,
Japan, Taiwan, the UK, and all over the United
States, and are employed as freelance illustrators,
art directors, staff artists for print publications, 3D
modelers, children’s book illustrators, animators,
comic artists, concept artists for games, toys, and
movies, and other diverse occupations.
All of the combined digital/traditional and
digital-only interviews, and most of the traditional
media interviews, are followed by mini-tutorials
showing the evolution of sample artworks from
initial sketch to finished product, with many
intermediate stages demonstrating approaches
to problem-solving. Both interviews and minitutorials
are full of rich detail about process, from
Jim Burns’s confession that he scanned a halved
pomegranate to get the effect he wanted for a digital
painting, making a sticky mess of his scanner, to
Brom’s favorite art tool: a beat-up old brush. ‘‘I
have dozens of mangy brushes in various states of
decay,’’ says Brom. ‘‘They’re great for scrubbing in
unique textures.’’ How-to instruction ranges from
general advice on tools and techniques (filters,
color theory, skin tones, light sources, vanishing
Kid embodies that preoccupation here, but really
everyone does. The whole point of the catastrophe
is that everyone, to some extent, is a stranger in their
own lives. Outsider status in Delany’s work is also,
increasingly, sexual outsider status. This only really
becomes clear by the time of Dhalgren and its successors
Triton, the Return to Nevèrÿon series, and
Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984).
Dhalgren is also profoundly concerned with how
race is experienced in society, and many of the
tensions in the book are racial ones.
But, as I say, Dhalgren is the last book from
which one might want to extract a ‘‘lesson’’ or a
‘‘moral.’’ The difficulty of the style is, as always
with Delany, a necessary part of the expression
of the whole. Some might regret the loss of the
exuberance of a book like Nova or its predecessors.
I’d argue, though, that Dhalgren is that
rarest of things: a book that, decades on, has not
been normalised. So many innovations of style or
content in SF become commodities, to be sold at
ever lower prices in ever more ways. Many people
have learned a great deal from Delany’s work – I’m
thinking particularly of William Gibson’s focus on
sensations and the surface of things. But Dhalgren
is a book without real successors. If SF hasn’t fully
absorbed its worth, that’s SF’s loss.
–Graham Sleight�
point perspective, etc.) to advice specific to the field
(monsters, gadgets, mood lighting, supernatural
creatures, costumes, cybernetic armor, futuristic
cityscapes, handling heroic images and poses, etc.).
From the quirky (‘‘Squinting is the most important
skill,’’ opines Scott M. Fischer, ‘‘Don’t commit to
anything until you’ve squinted at it so long that
the answer is obvious’’) to the pragmatic (‘‘It’s
so important that an artist’s folio is not just full of
the images he’s done, but contains images that he
wants to do,’’ says Dave Seely), there is something
here for everyone.
Ultimately, what shines through the pages is
devotion: this is a group of people passionately
devoted to science fiction, fantasy, and horror art.
As they describe their life stories, it’s impossible not
to be moved by stories of people doing what they’re
meant to do. It’s Donato Giancola’s comment that
comes to mind in the end: ‘‘There are no days off
in this business, but when you love what you do,
that doesn’t really matter.’’
SHORT TaKES
The Digital Matte Painting Handbook by David
Mattingly is of related interest. Chesley winner
Mattingly is a familiar name in the field, with
more than 1,200 SF and fantasy book covers under
his belt: in his spare time, he teaches skills learned
during his tenure as head of the Disney Studios
matte department. This how-to book is an intensive
technical course in digital matte painting for
film, covering basic concept sketches and Photoshop
skills, then moving on to Adobe After Effects
and Autodesk Maya. The book includes a forward
by Harrison Ellenshaw and is accompanied by a
DVD with supplementary files and teaching videos.
Although only some of the tutorial samples
are fantastical (a castle, a futuristic megastructure),
the skills used would certainly be suitable
to building an SFnal world for print or film. The
book would be valuable to artists interested in
buffing up their digital skills and developing an
understanding of 3-D effects: a filmic language
is now a part of the visual vernacular of SF and
fantasy art.
–Francesca Myman�

Note: This information, unlike the
Locus main list, is put together by Ian
Covell; send corrections to him at 24
St Pauls Road, Middlesbrough, TS1
5NQ, England. First world editions
marked with an asterisk. Comments
by Ian Covell.
* Ahern, Cecelia The Time of my Life
(HarperCollins UK 978-0-00-735043-
8, £16.99, 390pp, hc) Fantasy novel.
Lucy Silchester is summoned to an
interview with her Life, something she
has neglected for too long.
* Beck, Ian The Hidden Kingdom
(Oxford University Press 978-0-19-
275563-6, £6.99, 268pp, tp, cover by
Zdenko Basic & Manuel Sumberac)
Young-adult fantasy novel.
* Campbell, Ramsey Ghosts Know
(PS Publishing 978-1-848632-02-8,
£19.99, 235pp, hc, cover by James
Hannah) Horror novel. Things start
to go wrong for a radio talk show
host who tries to debunk a psychic.
This is a paper-over-boards edition;
a jacketed, signed, limited edition of
100 (-03-5, £39.99) is also available.
PS Publishing, Grosvenor House, 1
New Road, Hornsea, East Yorkshire
HU18 1PG England; .
* Cawkwell, Sarah Warhammer
40,000: The Gildar Rift (Black Library
978-1-84970-107-5, £8.99, 411pp, tp,
cover by Jon Sullivan) Tie-in novel
based on the roleplaying game universe,
part of the Space Marines
Battles series.
* Cobley, Michael The Ascendant
Stars (Little, Brown UK/Orbit 978-1-
84149-635-1, £13.99, xx+467pp, tp,
cover by Steve Stone) SF novel, third
in the Humanity’s Fire trilogy.
* Constantine, Storm Mythanimus
(Immanion Press 978-1-904853-60-2,
£12.99, 356pp, tp, cover by Danielle
Lainton) Collection of 15 stories, one
original. Notes on the origins of each
are included. A print-on-demand edition.
Immanion Press, 8 Rowley Grove,
Stafford, Staffordshire, ST17 9BJ, UK;
.
* Cottam, F.G. Broadmaw Bay
(Hodder & Stoughton 978-0-340-
98100-9, £19.99, 345pp, hc) Fantasy
novel.
British Books - November
* Crowther, Peter Darkness Falling
(Angry Robot 978-0-85766-171-5,
£7.99, 394pp, tp, cover by Vincent
Chong) Apocalyptic SF horror novel,
the first book in the Forever Twilight
trilogy. Simultaneous with the Angry
Robot US edition. A limited hardcover
edition of 100 (-173-9, £20.00) is also
available.
* Ford, Richard Kultus (Rebellion/
Solaris 978-1-907992-27-8, £7.99,
285pp, tp) Dark fantasy novel in the
Thaddeus Blaklok series.
* Gardner, Sally The Double Shadow
(Orion/Indigo 978-1-78062-012-1,
£12.99, 384pp, hc) Young-adult fantasy
novel.
* Henk, Dan The Black Seas of
Infinity (Anarchy Books 978-0-6155-
2564-8, £7.05, 267pp, tp) SF novel. A
first novel. This is copyrighted 2009,
but no previous edition is known. A
print-on-demand edition. Anarchy
Books,.
* Killough-Walden, Heather Avenger’s
Angel (Headline 978-0-7553-8037-
4, £6.99, 439pp, tp, cover by Lee
Gibbons) Fantasy novel, the first book
in the Lost Angels series. Simultaneous
with the US (Signet) edition.
* Kyme, Nick Warhammer 40,000:
Nocturne (Black Library 978-1-84970-
088-7, £7.99, 438pp, pb, cover by
Cheoljoo Lee) Tie-in novel set in the
world of the far-future roleplaying
game, the third book in the Tome of
Fire trilogy after Salamander and
Firedrake.
* Lee, Tanith To Indigo (Immanion
Press 978-1-907737-21-3, £11.99, tp,
cover by John Kaiine) Associational
psychological thriller. A writer of formulaic
detective novel gets a stalker.
A print-on-demand edition. Immanion
Press, 8 Rowley Grove, Stafford,
Staffordshire, ST17 9BJ, UK; .
* Lewis, Paul Malory’s Knights
of Albion: The Savage Knight
(Rebellion/Abaddon 978-1-907992-
33-9, £7.99, 284pp, tp, cover by Pye
Parr) Shared-world Arthurian fantasy
novel, the second in the series.
* McNeill, Graham Warhammer
40,000: The Horus Heresy: The
Outcast Dead (Black Library 978-1-
84970-086-3, £7.99, 459pp, pb, cover
by Neil Roberts) Tie-in novel set in the
universe of the roleplaying game.
* Moody, David Them or Us (Orion/
Gollancz 978-0-575-08472-8, £12.99,
361pp, tp, cover by Patrick Knowles)
Horror novel, the third in the Hater
trilogy. A hardcover edition (-08471-1,
£18.99) was announced but not seen.
* Oliver, Jon, ed. House of Fear
(Solaris 978-1-907992-06-3, £7.99,
402+vii, tp, cover by Luke Preece)
Original anthology of 19 horror stories,
one a reprint, about haunted
houses. Authors include Chaz
Brenchley, Christopher Fowler, and
Sarah Pinborough.
* Page, Ra & Magda Raczynska, eds.
Lemistry: A Celebration of the Work
of Stanislaw Lem (Comma Press
978-1-9055-8332-4, £7.99, 292pp, tp)
Original anthology of three stories by
Lem, translated to English for the first
time by Antonia Lloyd-Jones; 13 stories
(one reprint) by authors including
Brian Aldiss, Adam Roberts, and Ian
Watson; and four essays on Lem. Cocommissioned
by the Polish Cultural
Institute in London. Comma Press,
.
Ryan, Amy Kathleen Glow (Macmillan
Children’s Books UK 978-0-330-
53558-8, £7.99, 385pp, tp) Reprint
(St. Martin’s Griffin 2011) young-adult
SF novel, the first book in the Sky
Chasers/Children of a New Hope
trilogy.
* Sanderson, Brandon Alloy of Law
(Orion/Gollancz 978-0-575-10582-
9, £12.99, 332pp, tp, cover by Sam
Green) Fantasy novel, a standalone
in the universe of the Mistborn trilogy,
set 300 years later in a time of guns,
railroads, and electricity. A hardcover
edition (-10580-5, £18.99) was announced
but not seen. Simultaneous
with the US (Tor) edition.
* Sullivan, Michael J. Theft of Swords
(Little, Brown UK/Orbit 978-0-356-
50106-2, £7.99, v+664+xxv, tp, cover
by Larry Rostant) Fantasy omnibus
of the first two fantasy novels in the
Riyria Revelations series: The Crown
Conspiracy (2008) and Avempartha
(2009).
* Wasson, Sara & Emily Alder, eds.
Gothic Science Fiction: 1980-2010
(Liverpool University Press 978-1-
84631-707-1, £65.00, xix + 219pp,
hc, cover by Almacan) Non-fiction
selection of 11 essays on weird/
Gothic science fiction. Foreword by
Adam Roberts. Authors include Roger
Luckhurst, Laurence Davies, and
Aris Mousoutzanis. Includes index;
individual essays provide notes and
bibliographic references. Volume 41
in the Liverpool Science Fiction Texts
and Studies series.
* Wendig, Chuck Tomes of the Dead:
Double Dead (Rebellion/Abaddon
Books 978-1-907992-40-7, £7.99,
311pp, tp, cover by Pye Parr) Sharedworld
horror novel. Simultaneous with
the Abaddon US edition.
* Werner, C.L. Warhammer: The Red
Duke (Black Library 978-1-84970-073-
3, £7.99, 413pp, pb, cover by Cheoljoo
Lee) Tie-in novel set in the roleplaying
game universe, the fifth book in the
Warhammer Heroes sub-series.
* Whates, Ian, ed. Solaris Rising: The
New Solaris Book of Science Fiction
(Rebellion/Solaris 978-1-907992-08-7,
£7.99, 325pp, tp) Original anthology
of 19 stories. Authors include Ken
MacLeod, Adam Roberts, and Alastair
Reynolds. Simultaneous with the
Solaris US edition.�
November 2011 Year to Date
SF Novels 2 SF Novels 74
Fantasy Novels 5 Fantasy Novels 151
Horror Novels 5 Horror Novels 34
Paranormal Paranormal
Romance 0 Romance 52
Anthologies 3 Anthologies 20
Collections 1 Collections 15
Reference 1 Reference 5
History/Criticism 0 History/Criticism 3
Media Related 4 Media Related 43
Young Adult 2 Young Adult 99
SF 0 SF 14
Fantasy 2 Fantasy 50
Horror 0 Horror 14
Paranormal Paranormal
Romance 0 Romance 21
Other 0 Other 0
Omnibus 1 Omnibus 10
Art/Humor 0 Art/Humor 3
Miscellaneous 1 Miscellaneous 8
Total New: 25 Total New: 517
Reprints & Reprints &
Reissues: 1 Reissues: 345
Total: 26 Total: 862
LOCUS February 2012 / 71

Months Last
HARDCOVERS
on list month
1) Snuff, Terry Pratchett (Harper) 2 4
2) Reamde, Neal Stephenson (Morrow) 3 1
3) The Alloy of Law, Brandon Sanderson (Tor) 1 -
4) Inheritance, Christopher Paolini (Knopf) 1 -
5) A Dance With Dragons, George R.R. Martin (Bantam) 5
6) The Night Eternal, Guillermo del Toro &
2
Chuck Hogan (Morrow) 2 7
7) The Omen Machine, Terry Goodkind (Tor)
8) Aloha From Hell, Richard Kadrey
3 -
(Harper Voyager US) 1 -
9) The Children of the Sky, Vernor Vinge (Tor) 2 3
10) In Other Worlds, Margaret Atwood (Talese)
PAPERBACKS
2 10
1) A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin (Bantam) 17 3
*) A Storm of Swords, George R.R. Martin (Bantam) 14 1
3) A Clash of Kings, George R.R. Martin (Bantam) 14 4
4) A Feast for Crows, George R.R. Martin (Bantam) 13 2
5) Echo, Jack McDevitt (Ace)
6) Towers of Midnight, Robert Jordan &
1 -
Brandon Sanderson (Tor) 2 5
7) Kris Longknife: Daring, Mike Shepherd (Ace) 2 10
8) The Doomsday Vault, Steven Harper (Roc) 1 -
9) The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien (Del Rey) 30 -
10) World War Z, Max Brooks (Three Rivers) 1 -
Terry Pratchett’s Snuff moved into first place on the hardcover list,
dropping Reamde by Neal Stephenson to second place. The new runner-up
was Scholar by L.E. Modesitt, Jr. (Tor) with 41 titles nominated,
down a bit from last month’s 43.
George R.R. Martin continues his reign over the paperback list, with
A Game of Thrones taking first place and A Storm of Swords taking
second. The new runner-up was Magic on the Line by Devon Monk
(Roc) with 49 titles nominated, up from last month’s 43.
World War Z by Max Brooks moved up to first place on the trade paperback
list this month. The new runner-up was The Cold Commands
Compiled with data from: Bakka-Phoenix (Canada), Barnes and Noble (USA), Borderlands (CA), McNally Robinson (2 in Canada), Mysterious
Galaxy (CA), Toadstool (NH), and White Dwarf (Canada). Data period: November 2011.
General Bestsellers
HARDCOVERS
Damned, Chuck Palahniuk (Doubleday)
The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern (Doubleday)
A Dance with Dragons, George R.R. Martin (Bantam)
Zone One, Colson Whitehead (Doublebay)
Snuff, Terry Pratchett (Harper)
Forgotten Realms: Neverwinter: Neverwinter Saga, Book II,
R.A. Salvatore (Wizards of the Coast)
Reamde, Neal Stephenson (Morrow)
1Q84, Haruki Murakami (Knopf)
The Night Eternal, Guillermo Del Toro & Chuck Hogan (Morrow)
Halo: Glasslands, Karen Traviss (Tor)
Out of Oz, Gregory Maguire (Morrow)
11/22/63, Stephen King (Scribner)
The Alloy of Law, Brandon Sanderson (Tor)
Star Wars: The Old Republic: Revan, Drew Karpyshyn (Del Rey)
The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, Philip K. Dick
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
PAPERBACKS
A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin (Bantam)
Full Dark, No Stars, Stephen King (Pocket)
A Storm of Swords, George R.R. Martin (Bantam)
A Clash of Kings, George R.R. Martin (Bantam)
World War Z, Max Brooks (Three Rivers Press) •
A Feast for Crows, George R.R. Martin (Bantam)
A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan (Anchor) •
Towers of Midnight, Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson (Tor)
A Clash of Kings, George R.R. Martin (Bantam)•
A Feast for Crows, George R.R. Martin (Bantam) •
Star Wars: Riptide, Paul S. Kemp (Del Rey)
Kris Longknife: Daring, Mike Shepherd (Ace)
A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin (Bantam) •
72 / LOCUS February 2012
Locus Bestsellers
Months Last
TRADE PAPERBACKS
on list month
1) World War Z, Max Brooks (Three Rivers) 26 5
2) Enter, Night, Michael Rowe (ChiZine) 1 -
*) Ganymede, Cherie Priest (Tor)
4) The Revenge of the Dwarves, Markus Heitz
2 1
(Orbit US) 1 -
5) A Feast for Crows, George R.R. Martin (Bantam)
MEDIA-RELATED
1) Star Wars: The Old Republic: Revan,
1 -
Drew Karpyshyn (Del Rey) 1 -
2) Star Wars: Riptide, Paul S. Kemp (Del Rey)
3) Star Trek: Enterprise: The Romulan War:
2 2
To Brave the Storm, Michael A. Martin (Pocket) 1 -
4) Star Trek: Rise Like Lions, David Mack (Pocket) 1 -
5) Star Wars: The Jedi Path, Daniel Wallace (Chronicle) 3
GAMING-RELATED
3
1) Halo: Glasslands, Karen Traviss (Tor)
2) Forgotten Realms: Neverwinter, R.A. Salvatore
2 3
(Wizards of the Coast)
3) Warhammer 40,000: The Horus Heresy:
The Outcast Dead, Graham McNeill
2 1
(Black Library US)
4) Forgotten Realms: Gauntlgrym, R.A. Salvatore
2 4
(Wizards of the Coast)
5) Warhammer 40,000: Nocturne, Nick Kyme
12 2
(Black Library US) 1 -
by Richard K. Morgan (Gollancz). There were 36 titles nominated, up
a bit from last month’s 34.
Star Wars: Old Republic: Revan by Drew Karpyshyn was first on the
media-related titles this month, and there was no new runner-up. There
were only 10 titles nominated, down significantly from last month’s 20.
Halo: Glasslands by Karen Traviss took top honors in the gamingrelated
titles, and there was no new runner-up. There were 9 titles
nominated, down from 15 last month.
NY Times Bk Review Publishers Weekly Los Angeles Times
11/6 13 20 27 11/7 14 21 28 11/6 13 20 27
6 9 18 21 8 19 22 - - 12 11 18
11 14 17 17 13 - 17 22 11 16 - -
12 13 15 14 15 16 16 25 - - - -
16 19 - - 20 - - - 16 - - 13
17 22 28 - 22 - - - - - - -
26 29 32 - - - - - - - - -
33 - - - - - - - 20 - 18 -
- 2 6 6 2 5 5 8 10 1 1 1
- 7 24 26 6 23 - - - - - -
- 10 17 - 13 - - - - - - -
- - 9 13 - 9 7 18 - - - 15
- - - 1 - - 1 2 - - - 2
- - - 7 - - 7 9 - - - -
- - - - - - - 12 - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - 10
6 17 24 16 13 21 17 10 9 - 6 11
11 - - 31 - - - - - - - -
12 26 30 22 25 - 23 20 13 - 15 -
14 24 28 21 22 - - 24 12 - 7 -
15 22 - - 24 - - - - - - -
17 27 31 23 - - 20 - - - 13 -
17 18 19 18 - - - - 4 1 4 2
20 - - 34 - - - - - - - -
31 - - 33 - - - - - - - -
33 35 - - - - - - - - - -
- 19 - - 18 - - - - - - -
- 30 - - - - - - - - - -
- - - 28 - - - - - - - -
Catching Fire and Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins, Inheritance by Christopher Paolini, and Abarat: Absolute Midnight by Clive Barker made the hardcover
YA list. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins made the trade paper YA list. See Locus Online for weekly charts of genre books on these and eight other
general bestseller lists!
• trade paperback

Kage Baker, ancient Rockets (Tachyon 9/12) The late
SF writer Kage Baker spent the last year of her life
studying classic silent films and writing about them in
a weekly column online at Tor.com. This collects those
reviews and essays, with Baker’s personal take on over
50 ‘‘Treasures and Trainwrecks of the Silent Screen’’,
most SF or fantasy. Baker’s sister edited the book and
provides an introduction. ‘‘Kathleen Bartholomew
has done a lovely job of compiling this book. It is a
marvelous tribute to one the science fiction world lost
too early.’’ [Richard A. Lupoff]
Ramsey Campbell, Ghosts Know (PS 11/11) The
horror Grand Master proves he’s still at the top of his
game in his latest novel, about the controversial host
of a radio call-in show who attempts to debunk a fake
psychic and becomes embroiled in a missing-persons
investigation. The author ‘‘keeps the novel suspenseful
and unpredictable, right up to a bombshell revelation
in the closing pages. Campbell accentuates it with his
usual dexterous play with words and communication.
No other writer in contemporary horror and dark fantasy
is as attuned to the nuances and snares of language
as he is.’’ [Stefan Dziemianowicz]
Cathy Fenner & Arnie Fenner, eds. Spectrum 18: The
Best in Contemporary Fantastic art (Underwood
11/11) The latest lavish installment in the venerable
annual art book series presents more than 450 impeccably
reproduced images by more than 300 artists,
selected by a jury of experts in the field.
Neil Gaiman & Leslie S. Klinger The annotated
Sandman Volume One (DC Comics/Vertigo 1/12)
This annotated volume includes issues 1-20 of
Gaiman’s groundbreaking Sandman comics series.
The comics themselves are reproduced in black-andwhite,
but the attraction here is really the marginal
notes throughout organized by Klinger, which exhaustively
explain various historical and cultural references,
and provide behind-the-scenes insights gleaned
from Gaiman’s original scripts and correspondence.
Gaiman provides a foreword.
B&N/B. Dalton (print)
HARDCOVERS
1) A Dance with Dragons, George R.R. Martin (Bantam)
2) A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin (Bantam)
3) The Omen Machine, Terry Goodkind (Tor)
4) Snuff, Terry Pratchett (Harper)
5) Ghost Story, Jim Butcher (Roc)
6) Reamde, Neal Stephenson (Morrow)
7) The Alloy of Law, Brandon Sanderson (Tor)
8) The Night Eternal, Guillermo del Toro & Chuck Hogan (Morrow)
9) Himmler's War, Robert Conroy (Baen)
10) The Measure of the Magic, Terry Brooks (Del Rey)
PAPERBACKS
1) A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin (Bantam)
2) A Song of Ice and Fire boxed set, George R.R. Martin (Bantam)
3) A Clash of Kings, George R.R. Martin (Bantam)
4) A Storm of Swords, George R.R. Martin (Bantam)
5) A Feast for Crows, George R.R. Martin (Bantam)
6) The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien (Del Rey)
7) The Lost Gate, Orson Scott Card (Tor)
8) Pale Demon, Kim Harrison (HarperCollins)
9) Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card (Tor)
10) Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury (Del Rey)
TRADE PAPERBACKS
1) A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin (Bantam)
2) A Clash of Kings, George R.R. Martin (Bantam)
3) A Storm of Swords, George R.R. Martin (Bantam)
4) A Feast for Crows, George R.R. Martin (Bantam)
5) The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins)
MEDIA-RELATED
1) Star Wars: The Old Republic: Revan, Drew Karpyshyn (Del Rey)
2) Star Wars: The Jedi Path, Daniel Wallace (Chronicle)
3) How to Speak Wookie, Wu Kee Smith (Chronicle)
4) Lego Star Wars: The Visual Dictionary, Simon Beecroft (DK)
4) Star Wars: Shadow Games, Michael Reaves &
Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff (Del Rey)
GAMING-RELATED
1) Halo: Glasslands, Karen Traviss (Tor)
2) Forgotten Realms: Neverwinter, R.A. Salvatore
(Wizards of the Coast)
3) Assassin's Creed: Revelations, Oliver Bowden (Ace)
4) Forgotten Realms: Gauntlgrym, R.A. Salvatore
(Wizards of the Coast)
5) Warhammer 40K: Deliverance Lost, Gavin Thorpe (Black Library)
New & Notable
Theodora Goss, The Thorn and the Blossom (Quirk
1/12) The acclaimed writer of literary fantasy has
produced her longest work to date, a fantasy novella of
romance (and Romance) told in two parts, ‘‘Brendan’s
Story’’ and ‘‘Evelyn’s Story’’. This unusual, attractive
book is bound accordion-style and housed in a
slipcase; either ‘‘side’’ of the story can be read first.
Stephen King, 11/22/63 (Scribner 11/11) The master
of the macabre tackles time travel in this sprawling
tale about the Kennedy assassination and more personal
tragedies. English teacher Jake Epping discovers
a portal in the back of a diner that can transport
anyone to a particular day in 1958. Jake is enlisted
by the diner’s owner in a mission to live in the past,
at least long enough to save President Kennedy from
an assassin’s bullet – but he soon finds history doesn’t
want to be changed.
Ra Page & Magda Raczyńska, eds. Lemistry: a Celebration
of the Work of Stanislaw Lem (Comma
Press 9/11) This original anthology collects three
stories by the famed Polish SF writer; 13 stories inspired
by Lem from authors including Brian Aldiss,
Adam Roberts, and Ian Watson; and four essays on
Lem’s life, work, and influence.
R.A. MacAvoy, Death and Resurrection (Prime
12/11) The celebrated author of Tea with the Black
Dragon returns to the genre with her first fantasy
novel in nearly two decades, about a Chinese-American
artist who gains the ability to travel between the
worlds of the living and the dead. ‘‘MacAvoy clearly
still has the talent for the ingratiating characters and
revealing detail that made her first novel so delightful;
almost every character is handled with wit and
grace.’’ [Gary K. Wolfe]
Robert McCammon, The Hunter from the Woods
(Subterranean 12/11) The Nazi-fighting werewolf
secret agent Michael Gallatin from The Wolf’s Hour
(1989) returns in this collection of six linked stories,
covering his early years in Russia, his recruitment
to the British Secret Service, some of his adventures
in WWII, and even a glimpse of his twilight years.
‘‘Much of the appeal of these stories derives from their
believable grounding in historical detail and their
colorful settings.’’ [Stefan Dziemianowicz]
Jason Stoddard, Winning Mars (Prime 12/11) This
debut novel from a writer known for his exceptional
short fiction is expanded from the eponymous 2005
story, and concerns a producer in the dying medium
of televison who attempts to resurrect the reality show
with an ad-supported competitive mission to Mars,
complete with corporate sponsors and extreme sports.
Catherynne M. Valente, Myths of Origin (Wyrm
12/11) This omnibus gathers four of the author’s short
books, including her debut novel The Labyrinth
(2004); Japanese-influenced fantasies Yume No Hon:
The Book of Dreams (2006) and The Grass-Cutting
Sword (2005); and poetic Arthurian novella Under
in the Mere (2009), along with notes on each by the
author and an introduction by Jeff VanderMeer.
John C. Wright, Count to a Trillion (Tor 12/11) In
2235, years after the collapse of Western civilization,
a Texan mathematical genius, lawyer, and gunfighter
joins an expedition to explore a mysterious alien
artifact in a neighboring star system. Wright’s tale
hearkens back to Golden Age SF about omnicompetent
heroes changing the world with brains and boldness,
and constitutes ‘‘a full-throated and formidable
defense of a certain type of SF that has fallen out of
fashion – undeservedly so, in Wright’s opinion.... It’s
an important experiment to make... and I for one am
glad that a writer of Wright’s gifts and intelligence is
making it as forcefully as he can.’’ [Paul Witcover] �
audible.com (audio)
SCIENCE FICTION
1) 11/22/63, Stephen King (Simon & Schuster Audio)
2) Reamde, Neal Stephenson (Brilliance)
3) Ready Player One, Ernest Cline (Random House Audio)
4) Ender’s Game: Special 20th Anniversary Edition, Orson Scott Card
(Macmillan Audio)
5) Star Wars: The Old Republic: Revan, Drew Karpyshyn
(Random House Audio)
6) Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke (Audible Frontiers)
7) Dune, Frank Herbert (Macmillan Audio)
8) Fuzzy Nation, John Scalzi (Audible Frontiers)
9) Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson (Audible Frontiers)
10) Mindstar Rising, Peter F. Hamilton (Audible Frontiers)
11) Raising Stony Mayhall, Daryl Gregory (Audible Frontiers)
12) Star Force: Swarm, B.V. Larson (Audible Frontiers)
13) World War Z, Max Brooks (Random House Audio)
14) Solaris: The Definitive Edition, Stanislaw Lem, Bill Johnson (translator)
(Audible Frontiers)
15) Halo: Glasslands, Karen Traviss (Macmillan Audio)
16) Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke (Audible Frontiers)
17) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
(Random House Audio)
18) Star Force: Rebellion, B.V. Larson (Audible Frontiers)
19) One Second After, William R. Forstchen (Blackstone)
20) Star Carrier: Earth Strike, Ian Douglas (HarperCollins)
FANTASY
1) Inheritance, Christopher Paolini (Listening Library)
2) A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin (Random House Audio)
3) A Clash of Kings, George R.R. Martin (Random House Audio)
4) A Feast for Crows, George R.R. Martin (Random House Audio)
5) A Dance with Dragons, George R.R. Martin (Random House Audio)
6) A Storm of Swords, George R.R. Martin (Random House Audio)
7) The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern (Random House Audio)
8) The Fiery Cross, Diana Gabaldon (Recorded Books)
9) Hounded, Kevin Hearne (Brilliance)
10) The Alloy of Law, Brandon Sanderson (Macmillan Audio)
11) Outlander, Diana Gabaldon (Recorded Books)
12) Eragon, Christopher Paolini (Listening Library)
13) Hexed, Kevin Hearne (Brilliance)
14) Swordspoint, Ellen Kushner (Neil Gaiman Presents)
15) Dead Until Dark, Charlaine Harris (Recorded Books)
16) Good Omens, Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett (Harper Audio)
17) The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss (Brilliance)
18) The Wise Man's Fear, Patrick Rothfuss (Brilliance)
19) Hammered, Kevin Hearne (Brilliance)
20) Monster Hunter International, Larry Correia (Audible Frontiers)
LOCUS February 2012 / 73

Artist on SOPA/PIPA
� p. 10
policymakers have enacted to protect our works.
We, along with the rest of society, have benefited
immensely from a free and open Internet.
It allows us to connect with our fans and reach
new audiences. Using social media services
like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, we can
communicate directly with millions of fans and
interact with them in ways that would have been
unimaginable just a few years ago.
We fear that the broad new enforcement
powers provided under SOPA and PIPA could
be easily abused against legitimate services
like those upon which we depend. These bills
would allow entire websites to be blocked without
due process, causing collateral damage
to the legitimate users of the same services
– artists and creators like us who would be
censored as a result.
We are deeply concerned that PIPA and
SOPA’s impact on piracy will be negligible
compared to the potential damage that would
be caused to legitimate Internet services. Online
piracy is harmful and it needs to be addressed,
but not at the expense of censoring creativity,
stifling innovation or preventing the creation of
new, lawful digital distribution methods.
Author Michael Marshall Smith has some sympathy
for SOPA, and thinks the worries are overblown,
writing on his blog that,
I’d be interested to know what proportion of
the people most stridently against SOPA – by
The Data File
� p. 11
memberships to Chicon 7 or LoneStarCon 3 (the
2013 Worldcon) by January 31, 2012, or who were
members of Renovation (2011), may submit their
nominations by Sunday, March 11, 2012. Details
for how to submit a nomination ballot are available
at .
Press Release #8, January 11, 2012, announced
that Progress Report #3 had been mailed. Press
Release #9, January 16, 2012, announced that hotel
bookings were open for all members at the Hyatt
Regency Hotel, with room rates of $145 per night
(plus tax) for single through quad occupancy. For
more: .
The 2013 World Fantasy Convention has announced
writers Richard Matheson and his son
Richard Christian Matheson as the first author
guests of honour for the convention, to be held October
31 – November 3, 2013 in Brighton, England.
For more: .
Online News • Awards news website Science
Fiction Awards Watch has returned after a short
hiatus, during which previous owners Cheryl Morgan
and Kevin Standlee transferred ownership and
maintenance of the site to fan and blogger Steve
Davidson. Davidson has announced that he plans
to bring the listing of awards and nominations
back up to date soon. He also invites all those who
maintain awards to contact him with nomination
and selection schedules, since he plans to add a
‘‘comprehensive calendar of events’’ to the site’s
content.
Magazine News • Zahir, a quarterly journal of
speculative fiction, is closing, effective immediately.
Twenty issues of Zahir were published in
print from 2003-2009, and a further eight were
published after the magazine moved online, the
most recent in October 2011. Editor Sheryl Tempchin
says the online archive will remain available
indefinitely at , and print
back issues are still for sale.
74 / LOCUS February 2012
which I mean individuals, not organizations –
earn their living (and support their families)
though the creation of intellectual copyright
that is easily distributable over the Internet. My
guess is very, very few of them. Once you’ve
seen your life’s work thrown up for free on a
few pirate pits – or ‘social sharing sites’, as the
more brazen like to style themselves – you’re
far less sanguine about the free-for-all approach,
and more open to the idea that someone,
somewhere might want to do something
about copyright theft...
Why are people really so vehement about
SOPA? Two reasons, I suspect. Some people
will just go nuts about any hint of potential
governmental control over their lives. They assume
that every single measure that means
they could, theoretically, be prodded with
pointy legal sticks means that they definitely,
definitely will be... But this is ridiculous. The
idea that Big Business or the Government will
hunt you down because you’ve uploaded a
video of your wife singing a (copyrighted) song
is fatuously alarmist... [Congress is] trying to
defend pre-existing laws, not imprison everyone
or close down the bloody Internet. They
can’t even shut down all the pedophile sites, a
task I think we can all get behind – so do you
really think they’re going to take you or your
favorite mainstream sites down for your apparently
innocent acts? This is the same kind of
lunatic conspiracy thinking that believes the
government has been able to keep it secret
that the moon landings were faked for fifty
years. They’re just not that powerful or efficient
or deadly... except in your minds.
Defunct magazine Realms of Fantasy has announced
plans to fulfill existing subscriptions in
the following fashion: Space and Time magazine
will provide 1/3 of Realms print subscribers with
a complimentary back issue, 1/3 with a copy of
the Spring 2012 issue, and the remainder with
the Summer 2012 issue. Digital subscribers will
receive electronic copies. New digital speculative
fiction magazine Penumbra will fulfill all outstanding
issues for Realms of Fantasy’s electronic
subscribers, and will provide ‘‘multiple digital
issues’’ for print subscribers. For details:

e announced at a banquet April 26, 2012 at the
Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York.
In memoriam of the 100th anniversary of Bram
Stoker’s death, the Horror Writers Association
(HWA) is presenting the Bram Stoker Vampire
Novel of the Century Award for the vampire
novel that has had the greatest impact on the
horror genre since the publication of Dracula in
1897. Nominees, chosen by a jury of scholars and
writers, are: The Soft Whisper of the Dead by
Charles L. Grant (1983), ’Salem’s Lot by Stephen
King (1975), I am Legend by Richard
Matheson (1954), anno Dracula by Kim Newman
(1992), Interview with the Vampire by
Anne Rice (1976), and Hotel Transylvania by
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (1978).
To be considered, eligible works had to have
been published or translated into English between
1912 and 2011. The winning work will be
announced at the World Horror Convention in
Salt Lake City UT, March 31, 2012.
The Washington Science Fiction Association
is now accepting nominations for its Small Press
Award, given annually to an outstanding story of
‘‘imaginative literature’’ (17,500 words or fewer)
published by a small press. Authors and smallpress
publishers are eligible to nominate, and need
not be members of WSFA. The award committee
for this year is: Colleen Cahill (Chair), Cathy
Green, Paul Haggerty, Gayle Surrettee, Meagen
Voss, and Carolyn Frank (Administrator). The
deadline for nominations is April 1, 2012. For
more: .
Finalists for the 2011 Kitschies, awarded to ‘‘the
year’s most progressive, intelligent, and entertaining
works of genre literature’’ published in the
UK, have been announced: Red Tentacle (Best
Novel): The Enterprise of Death, Jesse Bullington
(Orbit); Embassytown, China Miéville (Del
Rey; Tor UK); a Monster Calls, Patrick Ness &
Siobhan Dowd (Walker); The Testament of Jesse
Lamb, Jane Rogers (Sandstone); Osama, Lavie
Tidhar (PS). Golden Tentacle (Debut Novel):
among Thieves, Douglas Hulick (Tor); God’s
War, Kameron Hurley (Night Shade); The Night
Circus, Erin Morgenstern (Doubleday; Harvill
Secker); Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar
Children, Ransom Riggs (Quirk); The Samaritan,
Fred Venturini (Blank Slate). Inky Tentacle
(Best Cover Art): Rivers of London, Ben Aaronovitch,
illustration by Stephen Walter, design by
Patrick Knowles/TAG Fine Arts (Gollancz); The
Last Werewolf, Glen Duncan, design by Peter
Mendelsund (Canongate); The Prague Cemetery,
Umberto Eco, illustration by John Spencer, design
by Suzanne Dean (Harvill Secker); Equations of
Life, Simon Morden, design by Lauren Panepinto
(Orbit); a Monster Calls, Patrick Ness & Siobhan
Dowd, illustration by Jim Kay (Walker). The
winner of the Red Tentacle will receive £750, and
winners of the Golden Tentacle and Inky Tentacle
will win £250 each. All finalists will receive a
bottle of rum from award sponsor The Kraken
Rum. This is the third year the awards have been
given. Anne C. Perry and Jared Shruin, founders
of geek culture website Pornokitsch, founded the
award and act as award directors.
Finalists were chosen from 150 submissions sent
by 38 publishers/imprints. Fiction winners will be
selected by judges Lauren Beukes, Rebecca Levene,
Anne C. Perry, and Jared Shurin. Judges for
the art award are Darren Banks, Hayley Campbell,
Catherine Hemelryk, Craig Kennedy, and Anne C.
Perry. Awards will be presented February 3, 2012
in a ceremony at the SFX Weeksnder 3 held at the
Prestatyn Sands holiday camp in Wales. For more:
.
The Spectrum Awards, given for outstanding
achievement in SF/fantasy art, will now give medals
to the art directors involved in the winning illustrations.
The new medal design is being created
by artist Tim Bruckner. This year’s awards will be
presented at Spectrum Fantastic Art Live!, held
May 18-20, 2012 in Kansas City MO. For more:
.
The Sir Julius Vogel Awards are open for nominations
from January 1, 2012 to March 31, 2012.
Members of the New Zealand National Science
Fiction convention and members of SFFANZ are
eligible to nominate. For more:
Jacqueline Monahan is this year’s winner of the
TransAtlantic Fan Fund. She will attend Olympus2012,
the 2012 Eastercon, at the Radisson
Edwardian, Heathrow, London, April 6-9, 2012.
Monahan beat out Warren Buff and Kim Kofnel.
2011 Stoker Preliminary Ballot • The 2011
Stoker Preliminary Ballot has been released. The
nomination process has changed, starting this
year. Each category has two preliminary ballots,
one based on recommendations of the Horror
Writers Association membership, and one based
on selections by a jury. Ideally, each category on
the final ballot will include three selections from
the ‘‘Recs’’ ballot and three from the ‘‘Jury’’
ballot. If either of those ballots includes three or
fewer works, all titles will automatically appear
on the final ballot, though they should not be referred
to as ‘‘Stoker finalists’’ until the final ballot
is announced. New categories have also been
added: Young-Adult Novel, Graphic Novel, and
Screenplay.
Superior Achievement in a Novel (Recs):
Cosmic Forces, Greg Lamberson (Medallion);
Houdini Heart, Ki Longfellow (Eio); Floating
Staircase, Ronald Malfi (Medallion); Not Fade
away, Gene O’Neill (Bad Moon); Blood Born,
Matthew Warner (HW). Superior Achievement
in a Novel (Jury): a Matrix of angels, Christopher
Conlon (Creative Guy); Willy, Robert
Dunbar (Uninvited); Flesh Eaters, Joe McKinney
(Kensington/Pinnacle); The Dracula Papers,
Book 1: The Scholar’s Tale, Reggie Oliver
(Chomu); The German, Lee Thomas (Lethe).
Superior Achievement in a First Novel (Recs):
Isis Unbound, Allyson Bird (Dark Regions);
The Lamplighters, Lee Frazer (Samhain); High
Moor, Graeme Reynolds (Horrific Tales); That
Which Should Not Be, Brett J. Talley (Journalstone);
The armageddon Chord, Jeremy
Wagner (kNight Romance). Superior Achievement
in a First Novel (Jury): Southern Gods,
John Horner Jacobs (Night Shade); The Panama
Laugh, Thomas Roche (Night Shade). Superior
Achievement a Young-Adult Novel (Recs):
Ghosts of Coronado Bay, J.G. Faherty (Journalstone);
The Screaming Season, Nancy Holder
(Razorbill); Dust & Decay, Jonathan Maberry
(Simon & Schuster); Blind Hunger, Araminta
Star Matthews (Dark Moon). Superior Achievement
a Young-Adult Novel (Jury): anna Dressed
in Blood, Kendare Blake (Tor Teen); Rotters,
Daniel Kraus (Delacorte); a Monster Calls, Patrick
Ness (Candlewick); This Dark Endeavor:
The apprenticeship of Victor Frankenstein,
Kenneth Oppel (Simon & Schuster); Divergent,
Veronica Roth (Katherine Tegen). Superior
Achievement Graphic Novel (Recs): Locke
& Key, Volume 4, Joe Hill (IDW); Marvel
Universe vs. The Punisher, Jonathan Maberry
(Marvel); Marvel Universe vs. Wolverine, Jonathan
Maberry (Marvel); The Plague Ships, Mike
Mignola & Christopher Golden; Candice Crow,
Sean O’Reilly, Joe Nassise, & Halston Weick
(Arcana Studio). Superior Achievement Graphic
Novel (Jury): anya’s Ghost, Vera Brosgol (First
Second); Echoes, Joshua Hale Fialkov (Image);
Green River Killer, Jeff Jensen (Dark Horse);
Neonomicon, Alan Moore (Avatar); Cradlegrave,
John Smith (Rebellion 2000AD). Superior
Achievement Long Fiction (Recs): Dark Water:
Beaming Smile, Kevin James Breaux (Hellfire);
7Brains, Michael Louis Calvillo (Burning Effigy);
Ursa Major, John R. Little (Bad Moon);
Rusting Chickens, Gene O’Neill (Dark Regions);
The Fields, Ty Schwamberger (Apex).
Superior Achievement Long Fiction (Jury):
‘‘Roots and All’’, Brian Hodge (a Book of Horrors);
‘‘The Colliers’ Venus (1893)’’, Caitlín R.
Kiernan (Naked City); ‘‘The Music of Bengt
Karlsson, Murderer’’, John Ajvide Lindqvist (A
Book of Horrors); ‘‘Alice Through the Plastic
Sheet’’, Robert Shearman (a Book of Horrors);
‘‘The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine’’, Peter
Straub (Conjunctions 56: Terra Incognita).
Superior Achievement in Short Fiction (Recs):
‘‘It Tears Away’’, Michael Bailey (The Shadow
of the Unknown); ‘‘Hypergraphia’’, Ken Lillie-
Paetz (The Uninvited 8/11); ‘‘Graffiti Sonata’’,
Gene O’Neill (Dark Discoveries Winter/Spring
‘11); ‘‘X is for Xyx’’, John Palisano (M is for
Monster); ‘‘All You Can Do Is Breathe’’, Kaaron
Warren (Blood and Other Cravings). Superior
Achievement in Short Fiction (Jury): ‘‘Atria’’, Ramona
Ausubel (The New Yorker 4/4/11); ‘‘Sunbleached’’,
Nathan Ballingrud (Teeth); ‘‘Her
Husband’s Hands’’, Adam-Troy Castro (Lightspeed
10/4/11); ‘‘Herman Wouk Is Still Alive’’,
Stephen King (The Atlantic 5/11); ‘‘Home’’,
George Saunders (The New Yorker 6/13/11). Superior
Achievement in a Screenplay (Recs): True
Blood: ‘‘Spellbound’’, Alan Ball; Priest, Cory
Goodman; The Adjustment Bureau, George
Nolfi. Superior Achievement in a Screenplay
(Jury): The Walking Dead: ‘‘Pretty Much Dead
Already’’, Scott M. Gimple; The Walking Dead:
‘‘Save the Last One’’, Scott M. Gimple; Fright
Night, Marti Noxon; Troll Hunter, Andre Ovrehahl
& Havard S. Johansen; American Horror
Story: ‘‘Afterbirth’’, Jessica Sharzer. Superior
Achievement in an Anthology (Recs): Epitaphs:
The Journal of the New England Horror Writers,
Tracy L. Carbone, ed. (Shroud); Tattered
Souls 2, Frank J. Hutton, ed. (Cutting Block);
Demons: Encounters with the Devil and His
Minions, Fallen angels, and the Possessed,
John Skipp, ed. (Black Dog & Leventhal). Superior
Achievement in an Anthology (Jury): Ghosts
by Gaslight, Jack Dann & Nick Gevers, eds.
(Harper Voyager US); Blood and Other Cravings,
Ellen Datlow, ed. (Tor); Supernatural
Noir, Ellen Datlow, ed. (Dark Horse); Teeth, Ellen
Datlow & Terri Windling, eds. (Harper); The
Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities,
Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, eds. (Harper Voyager
US). Superior Achievement in a Collection
(Recs): Let’s Play White, Chesya Burke (Apex);
Voices: Tales of Horror, Lawrence C. Connolly
(Fantasist Enterprises); Eldritch Evolutions,
Lois Gresh (Chaosium); The Last Days of Kali
Yuga, Paul Haines (Brimstone); Monsters of
L.a., Lisa Morton (Bad Moon); Multiplex Fandango,
Weston Ochse (Dark Regions). Superior
Achievement in a Collection (Jury): Red Gloves:
The London Horrors, Christopher Fowler (PS);
Two Worlds and In Between, Caitlín R. Kiernan
(Subterranean); Engines of Desire, Livia
Llewellyn (Lethe); The Corn Maiden and
Other Nightmares, Joyce Carol Oates (Mysterious
Press); Mrs. Midnight and Other Stories,
Reggie Oliver (Tartarus). Superior Achievement
in Non-Fiction (Recs): Halloween Nation: Be-
�
LOCUS February 2012 / 75

� The Data File
hind the Scenes of america’s Fright Night,
Lesley Pratt Bannatyne (Pelican); Starve Better,
Nick Mamatas (Apex); Everything You Ever
Wanted to Know about Zombies, Matt Mogk
(Gallery). Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction
(Jury): Reflections in a Glass Darkly, Gary William
Crawford, Jim Rockhill, & Brian J. Showers,
eds. (Hippocampus); Dark Stars Rising, Shade
Rupe (Headpress); Letters to James F. Morton,
H.P. Lovecraft, with David E. Shultz & S.T. Joshi,
eds. (Hippocampus); The Gothic Imagination,
John C. Tibbetts (Palgrave Macmillan); Stephen
King: a Literary Companion, Rocky Wood
(McFarland). Superior Achievement in a Poetry
Collection (Recs): at Louche Ends, Maria Alexander
(Burning Effigy); Shroud of Night, G.O.
Clark (Dark Regions); Blood Wallah and Other
Poems, Robert Borski (Dark Regions); The Mad
Hattery, Marge Simon (Elektrik Milk Bath);
The Land of Bad Dreams, Kyla Lee Ward
(P’rea). Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection
(Jury): How to Recognize a Demon Has
Become Your Friend, Linda Addison (Necon);
Surrealities, Bruce Boston (Dark Regions);
Skeleton Leaves, Helen Marshall (Kelp Queen);
Twisted in Dream, Ann K. Schwader (Hippocampus);
Unearthly Delights, Marge Simon
(Sam’s Dot).
Horror Writers Association members will vote
to choose final nominees from this list, and then
vote again to determine winners. Winning titles
will be announced at the 2012 World Horror Convention,
March 29 - April 1, 2012 in Salt Lake
City UT. For more: .
Financial News • US Census Bureau preliminary
figures for November show estimated bookstore
sales of $941 million, up 6% from October, but
down 9% from November 2010. Year-to-date sales
are up 1% to $13.7 billion. Overall retail sales were
up 4% from October, and up 8% YTD.
The AAP sales report for October showed the
growth in e-book sales slowing a bit, up 81.2% for
the month and up 131.1% (to $807.7 million) for the
year to date. Compared to October 2010, e-book
sales were up $32.6 million, not enough to make up
for a $61.9 million drop in print trade sales. Adult
hardcovers fell 16.9% in October (down 18.3%
YTD), adult trade paperbacks dropped 18.2%
(down 16.8% YTD), mass market paperbacks
dropped 37.6% (down 33.7% YTD), juvenile hardcovers
fell 7.3% (down 10.9% YTD), and juvenile
paperbacks were down 2.4% (down 12.9% YTD).
Scholastic reported a strong second quarter ending
November 30, with sales of $685.3 million (up
3%) and net income of $82.8 million (up 10.5%).
Most of the increase came from educational divisions;
children’s book publishing saw sales up less
than 1% to $388.6 million.
Amazon declared 2011 ‘‘the best holiday ever
for the Kindle family’’ with customers buying
‘‘well over one million Kindle devices per week.’’
Amazon’s holiday e-book bestsellers were The
Hunger Games and Catching Fire by Suzanne
Collins and The Litigators by John Grisham. Top
print books included 11/22/63 by Stephen King.
HarperCollins UK reported record e-book sales
for Christmas Day 2011, with over 100,000 digital
editions downloaded – not including US sales. That
was about six times the daily number of downloads
during November. Top sellers included George
R.R. Martin’s a Game of Thrones. According
to HarperCollins Group digital director David
Roth-Ey, e-readers and tablets were a ‘‘must-have
gift’’ this Christmas, and the company planned
accordingly with new ebooks and digital-exclusive
76 / LOCUS February 2012
stories out in December.
International Rights • Korean rights to The
Secret of the Universe by Isaac Asimov sold
to Galmaenamu via Sue Yang of the Eric Yang
Agency in association with Sylvie Rosokoff of
Trident Media Group on behalf of John Silbersack.
Italian rights to Solaris by Stanislaw Lem sold
to Antonio Sellerio at Sellerio via Piergiorgio
Nicolazzini.
Korean rights to Mind Tools by Rudy Rucker
went to The Open Books via Donghwi Kim of
the Eric Yang Agency in association with Sylvie
Rosokoff of Trident Media Group on behalf of
John Silbersack.
Simplified Chinese rights to Startide Rising
and The Postman by David Brin sold to Science
Fiction World via Gray Tan at The Grayhawk
Agency on behalf of Heather Baror-Shapiro at
Baror International.
Polish rights to Wake, Watch, and Wonder
by Robert J. Sawyer sold to Solaris via The Lotts
Agency.
Italian rights to Starship: Pirate by Mike
Resnick went to Mondadori via Maura Solinas of
Piergiorgio Nicolazzini Literary Agency on behalf
of Spectrum Literary Agency.
Czech rights to 77 Shadow Street by Dean
Koontz sold to BB Art via Lennart Sane.
Hebrew rights to The Way of Kings by Brandon
Sanderson and Hero of ages went to Opus Press
via Dalia Ever Hadani of The Book Publishers
Association of Israel, and Spanish rights to The
alloy of Law sold to Ediciones B via Monse F-
Yanez of Julio F-Yanez Agency, all on behalf of
Joshua Bilmes.
Thai rights to The Blackwell Pages trilogy by
K.L. Armstrong & M.A. Marr sold to Amarin
Printing via Thananchai Pandey of Tuttle-Mori
Thailand on behalf of Cecilia de la Campa and
Merrilee Heifetz of Writers House and Sarah
Heller of the Helen Heller Agency.
French rights to the Enclave trilogy by Ann
Aguirre sold to Black Moon via La Nouvelle
Agence on behalf of Taryn Fagerness Agency
and Laura Bradford of Bradford Literary Agency.
Russian rights to Michael J. Sullivan’s Riyria
Revelations series sold to AST via Andrew Nurnberg
Associates on behalf of Teri Tobias Agency.
French rights to The Blood of angels by Johanna
Sinisalo sold to Actes Sud via Elina Ahlback.
Turkish rights to The Stepsister Scheme and
The Mermaid’s Madness by Jim C. Hines sold to
Itaki Yayinlari via Muhtesim Guvenc of Anatolialit
Agency on behalf of Joshua Bilmes.
Danish rights to Feast of Fools, Lord of Misrule,
and Carpe Corpus by Rachel Caine sold to
Tellerup, and Swedish rights to Midnight alley
sold to Styxx Fantasy, all via Philip Sane of Lennart
Sane Agency on behalf of Lucienne Diver of
The Knight Agency.
Complex Chinese rights to Seekers by Evan
Hunter sold to Yuan Liou via Alex Webb of Rights
People on behalf of Working Partners.
Simplified Chinese rights to the Secret Circle
series by L.J. Smith sold to Chongqing Daily News
via Alex Webb at Rights People on behalf of Alloy
Entertainment.
German rights to Heaven’s Shadow by David S.
Goyer sold to Verlagsgruppe Random House, and
Russian rights sold to Bard, via Ace.
Dutch rights to The Reluctant Vampire by
Lynsay Sands sold to De Vrijbuiter via Philip Sane
of Lennart Sane Agency on behalf of Jenny Bent.
French rights to The Undertakers: Rise of the
Corpses by Ty Drago sold to Bayard via Eliane
Benisti Agency on behalf of Anne Landa.
Estonian rights to The Shadow Kiss by Richelle
Mead sold to Eram via Kristine Shatrovska of
Andrew Nurnberg Associates on behalf of Lauren
Abramo of Dystel & Goderich Literary Management.
Romanian rights to Vampire Kisses, Kissing
Coffins, and Vampireville by Ellen Scheiber sold
to Leda via Mira Droumeva of Andrew Nurnberg
Associates Sofia in association with Sylvie
Rosokoff of Trident Media Group on behalf of
Ellen Levine.
Audio Rights • Audio rights to The Wake of the
Bloody angel by Alex Bledsoe went to Blackstone
via Marlene Stringer of The Stringer Literary
Agency.
Other Rights • Large print rights to Deadlocked
by Charlaine Harris sold to Thorndike via Ace.
Audiobooks Received • Triumff: Her Majesty’s
Hero by Dan Abnett (Brilliance Audio,
$29.99, 8 CDs, 8 hours: 43 minutes, 978-1-4558-
4882-9) Unabridged audio version of Triumff:
Her Majesty’s Hero read by Simon Vance.
Shadows in Flight by Orson Scott Card (Macmillan
Audio, $29.99, 6 CDs, 7 hours, 978-1-4272-
1568-0) Unabridged audio version of Shadows in
Flight read by Stefan Rudnicki and cast.
a Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke (Brilliance
Audio, $19.99, 7 CDs, 8 hours: 12 minutes,
978-1-4558-5696-1) Unabridged audio version of A
Fall of Moondust read by Oliver Wyman.
The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke
(Brilliance Audio, $19.99, 7 CDs, 8 hours: 31
minutes, 978-1-4558-5768-5) Unabridged audio
version of The Fountains of Paradise read by
Marc Vietor.
Warhammer 40,000: Galaxy in Flames by
Ben Counter (Black Library, $29.95, 5 CDs, 6
hours, 978-1-84970-095-5) Abridged audio version
of the Warhammer 40,000: Galaxy in Flames
read by Martyn Ellis.
Forbidden by Ted Dekker and Tosca Lee
(Hachette Audio, $34.98, 10 CDs, 11.5 hours,
978-1-61113-910-5) Unabridged audio version of
Forbidden read by Henry Leyva.
all Tommorrow’s Parties by William Gibson
(Brilliance Audio, $19.99, 9 CDs, 11 hours: 2
minutes, 978-1-4558-5697-8) Unabridged audio
version of all Tommorrow’s Parties, read by
Jonathan Davis.
Burning Chrome by William Gibson (Brilliance
Audio, $19.99, 6 CDs, 7 hours: 10 minutes,
978-1-4558-5705-0) Unabridged audio version of a
collection of ten short stories, including ‘‘Burning
Chrome’’, read by Jonathan Davis and cast.
Sisterhood of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin
J. Anderson (Macmillan Audio, $59.99, 16 CDs, 20
hours, 978-1-4272-1469-0) Unabridged version of
Sisterhood of Dune read by Scott Brick.
Infernal Devices by K.W. Jeter (Brilliance
Audio, $29.99, 8 CDs, 9 hours: 15 minutes, 978-
1-4558-4850-8) Unabridged audio version of
Infernal Devices read by Michael Page.
Timecaster by J.A. Konrath writing as Joe Kimball
(Brilliance Audio, $14.99, 8 CDs, 9 hours: 17
minutes, 978-1-4558-1177-9) Unabridged version
of Timecaster read by Patrick Lawlor.
Wild Cards II edited by George R.R. Martin
(Brilliance Audio, $34.99, 13 CDs, 15 hours,
978-1-4558-3292-7) Unabridged audio version of
the second Wild Cards anthology read by Luke
Daniels.
Down These Strange Streets: all-New Stories
of Urban Fantasy edited by George R.R. Martin
& Gardner Dozois (Brilliance Audio, $34.99, 18
CDs, 22 hours: 3 minutes, 978-1-4558-3043-5) Un-

abridged audio recording of Down These Strange
Streets: all-New Stories of Urban Fantasy read
by Nicola Barber, Phil Gigante, & Ralph Lister.
Songs of Love & Death edited by George R.R.
Martin & Gardner Dozois (Brilliance Audio,
$34.99, 16 CDs, 19 hours: 43 minutes, 978-1-4558-
3071-8) Unabridged audio recording of Songs of
Love & Death read by Julia Whelan, Phil Gigante,
Michael Page, & Susan Duerden.
Late Eclipses by Seanan McGuire (Brilliance
Audio, $29.99, 10 CDs, 11 hours: 57 minutes,
978-1-4558-4830-0) Unabridged audio recording
of Late Eclipses read by Mary Robinette Kowal.
One Salt Sea by Seanan McGuire (Brilliance
Audio, $29.99, 11 CDs, 12 hours: 45 minutes,
978-1-4558-4825-6) Unabridged audio recording
of One Salt Sea read by Mary Robinette Kowal.
IQ84 by Haruki Murakami (Brilliance Audio
on MP3-CD, $29.99, 3 MP3-CDs, 46 hours: 16
minutes, 978-1-4558-3051-0) Unabridged audio
recording of IQ84 read by Alison Hiroto, Marc
Vietor, & Mark Boyett.
Hellbent by Cherie Priest (Brilliance Audio,
$29.99, 9 CDs, 10 hours: 42 minutes, 978-1-4418-
9091-7) Unabridged audio recording of Hellbent
read by Natalie Ross.
When the Devil Dances by John Ringo
(Brilliance Audio, $19.99, 17 CDs, 20 hours: 21
minutes, 978-1-4558-5780-7) Unabridged audio
recording of When the Devil Dances read by
Marc Vietor.
Working for the Devil by Lilith Saintcrow
(Brilliance Audio, $29.99, 9 CDs, 10 hours: 56
minutes, 978-1-4418-8713-9) Unabridged audio
version of Working for the Devil, the first book
in the Dante Valentine series, read by Tanya Eby.
Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer (Brilliance
Audio, $19.99, 10 CDs, 11 hours: 31 minutes,
978-1-4558-5731-9) Unabridged audio version of
Hominids read by Jonathan Davis.
Humans by Robert J. Sawyer (Brilliance Audio,
$19.99, 10 CDs, 11 hours: 37 minutes, 978-1-4558-
5732-6) Unabridged audio version of Humans read
by Jonathan Davis.
The Thirteen Hallows by Michael Scott &
Colette Freedman (Macmillan Audio, $39.99, 9
CDs, 11 hours, 978-1-4272-1348-8) Unabridged
audio recording of The Thirteen Hallows read
by Kate Reading.
Second Star: a Star Svensdotter adventure
by Dana Stabenow (Brilliance Audio, $24.99,
6 CDs, 7 hours: 20 minutes) Unabridged audio
recording of Second Star: a Star Svensdotter
2011 Book Summary
� p. 55
We recommended books from 66 publishers, down
from 69 publishers last year, including 20 from the
UK, five from Australia, and three from Canada.
There were 25 small presses with 59 recommended
titles between them. Random House had the most
recommended titles with 16, followed closely
by Hachette/Orbit US and Night Shade Books,
CHART 5: Locus Bestsellers
TOP PUBLISHERS
2011 ’10 ’09 ’08 ’07 ’06 ’05 ’04
1. Random House/Del Rey 32% 14 11 19 + 21 + 24 + 24 + 25 +
2. Penguin Group USA 21% 33 35 24 20 15 19 19
3. Tor 16% 16 13 20 20 20 16 17
4. HarperCollins 7% 10 10 13 15 20 21 16
*. DAW 7% 4 4 4 3 3 3 4
6. Baen 5% 5 3 4 3 7 8 5
7. Hachette/Orbit US°° 4% 10 12 8 5 2 3 -
8. Night Shade 2% 2 - - - - - -
adventure read by Marguerite Gavin.
Currency by Neal Stevenson (Brilliance Audio,
$19.99, 12 CDs, 14 hours: 20 minutes, 978-1-4558-
5711-1) Unabridged audio version of Currency:
Book Seven of the Baroque Cycle read by Simon
Prebble and Kevin Pariseau.
Reamde by Neal Stephenson (Brilliance Audio,
$38.99, 32 CDs, 38 hours: 50 minutes, 978-1-4558-
3038-1) Unabridged audio recording of Reamde
read by Malcolm Hillgartner.
Solomon’s Gold by Neal Stevenson (Brilliance
Audio, $19.99, 12 CDs, 14 hours: 16 minutes,
978-1-4558-5757-9) Unabridged audio version of
Solomon’s Gold: Book Six of the Baroque Cycle
read by Simon Prebble and Kevin Pariseau.
Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor
(Hachette Audio, $26.98, 10 CDs, 12.5 hours,
978-1-61113-297-7) Unabridged audio version of
Daughter of Smoke and Bone read by Khristine
Hvam. Includes a conversation with Taylor.
Gears of War: Coalition’s End by Karen Traviss
(Brilliance Audio, $29.99, 17 Cds, 20 hours:
29 minutes, 978-1-4558-4114-1) Unabridged audio
recording of Gears of War: Coalition’s End read
by David Colacci.
The Folded World by Catherynne M. Valente
(Brilliance Audio, $32.99, 8 CDs, 9 hours: 18
minutes, 978-1-4418-7028-5) Unabridged audio
version of The Folded World read by Ralph Lister.
Publications Received • Burroughs Bulletin,
#85 (Winter 2011), quarterly publication of The
Burroughs Bibliophiles, with articles on Edgar
Rice Burroughs’s life and works, plus letters and
reviews. Information: George T. McWhorter, 318
Patriot Way, Yorktown VA 23693; phone: (573)
647-0225; e-mail: .
Mythprint Vol. 48, No. 11 (November 2011),
No. 12 (December 2012), monthly bulletin of
the Mythopoeic Society, with news, reviews, etc.
Non-member subscription: $25.00 per year US,
$32.00 Canada and Mexico, $41.00 elsewhere.
Information: Mythopoeic Society Orders Department,
Box 71, Napoleon MI 49261-0071; e-mail:
; website: .
Rabbit Hole 51 Vol. 13, No. 2 (Winter 2011),
newsletter of the Harlan Ellison Recording Collection,
with essays, letters, and listings of books
and recordings. Membership: $16.00 for six issues.
Information: The Harlan Ellison Recording Collection,
PO Box 55548, Sherman Oaks CA 91413.
each with 12. Penguin Group USA and Tor were
next with 11 each, followed by HarperCollins US
and Little, Brown UK/Orbit, both with nine; and
Orion/Gollancz with seven.
COMMERCIaL SUCCESS
Bestseller lists give us our best indicator
of commercial success, since the publishers
themselves are rarely forthcoming. Charts #5 and
#6 show which publishers dominated the lists,
Star*Line, Vol. 34, No. 4 (October-December
2011), quarterly journal of the Science Fiction
Poetry Association, with poetry, news, reviews,
market information, etc. Single Issue $5.00, Membership:
$21.00 per year US, Mexico, and Canada,
$25.00 elsewhere. Contact Deborah Flores, SFPA
Treasurer, PO Box 4846, Covina, CA 91723;
e-mail: ; website:
.
The Time Centre Times, Vol. 6, No. 1 (November
2011), occasional journal of The Nomads of the
Time Streams: The International Michael Moorcock
Appreciation Society, with fiction, news,
reviews, market information, original artwork,
etc. Membership: £12.50 for four issues in the UK,
$25.00 in the US, £20.00 elsewhere. North American
contact: PO Box 385716, Waikoloa, HI 96738-
0716; all others contact D.J. Rowe, Mo Dhachaidh,
Loch Awe, Dalmally, Argyll, PA33 1AQ, Scotland;
e-mail: .
Catalogs Received • DreamHaven Books, 2301
E. 38th Street, Minneapolis MN 55406; phone:
(612) 823-6070; e-mail: ;
website: . Catalogs #253 (November/December 2011),
#254 (January 2012) with new/recent SF, fantasy,
and horror books and magazines, plus used, rare,
and collectible books, many first editions, hardcovers,
and paperbacks.
Harlan Ellison Signed and Personalized Books
Catalogue, The Kilimanjaro Corporation, PO Box
55548, Sherman Oaks CA 91413-4598; books,
audio, and related items from Harlan Ellison’s
collection.
Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore/Uncle
Edgar’s Mystery Bookstore; 2864 Chicago Ave.
S., Minneapolis MN 55407; phone: Uncle Hugo’s:
(612) 824-6347; Uncle Edgar’s: (612) 824-9984;
e-mail: ; website: . Catalog #96 (December,
2011-February 2012) with new and used SF and
mystery. Includes news and reviews.
Wrigley Cross Books; PMB 455, 2870 NE
Hogan Rd., Ste E., Gresham OR 97030; phone:
(503) 667-0807; toll free: (877) 694-1467; e-mail:
; website:
. Catalog #186
(January 2012) with new and used SF, fantasy,
mystery, and horror. �
with percentages based on the number of times
each publisher had a book appear. The chain lists
are kept separate from the Locus list to help track
variations. The Locus list is based primarily on
reports from specialty stores, and should reflect a
more knowledgeable readership. The figures here
do not include media and gaming-related titles,
which are dominated by just a few publishers;
Star Wars books from Del Rey and DK and Star
�
CHART 6: Chain Bestsellers
TOP PUBLISHERS:
B&N/B. DALTON, BORDERS/WALDEN
2011 ’10 ’09 ’08 ’07 ’06 ’05 ’04
1. Random House/Del Rey 38% 14 10 19 + 25 + 24 + 26 + 21 +
2. Penguin Group USA 22% 45 50 32 23 14 15 14
3. Tor 15% 14 7 14 16 16 17 18
4. DAW 7% 2 - 2 4 2 3 3
*. HarperCollins 7% 7 11 16 18 27 21 15
6. Baen 4% 4 2 3 3 6 5 3
*. Hachette/Orbit US°° 4% 9 12 8 4 3 2 -
°°previously Warner/Little, Brown + includes Bantam/D’day/Dell/Ballantine/Del Rey - indicates a figure less than 2%
LOCUS February 2012 / 77

� 2011 Book Summary
Trek titles from Pocket dominate the media tie-ins,
while Black Library US, Wizards of the Coast, and
Tor battle for top spot in gaming.
The Locus list saw the usual players shuffling
around, with one dropping off and no newcomers.
Random House jumped into the top spot with a big
lead, thanks primarily to George R.R. Martin’s
A Song of Ice and Fire series, which took off
with publication of a Dance with Dragons
and the success of the HBO series – similar to
last year’s domination by Penguin thanks to
Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse/True Blood
series. Penguin Group USA ended up in second
place, with Tor returning in third. DAW and
HarperCollins tied for fourth, followed by Baen
in sixth, Hachette/Orbit US in seventh, and Night
Shade in eighth. Quirk Books dropped off the list
after two years riding on the popularity of Pride
and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen &
Seth Grahame-Smith.
The chain bestseller lists represent the broader
book market, but their results were similar to the
Locus list. The demise of Borders meant that after
mid-year we only ran lists from Barnes & Noble.
Random House took top place here, too, with an
ever bigger lead than on the Locus lists, taking up
38% of the spots on the chain lists. Penguin Group
USA followed in second, with Tor third. Daw and
HarperCollins tied again for fourth, while Baen
and Hachette/Orbit US tied for sixth.
2011 Magazine Summary
� p. 59
Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Coode
Street Podcast, StarShipSofa, and Drabblecast.
QUaLITY
Our gauge of quality is our short fiction Recommended
Reading list; see chart. We recommended
120 pieces of short fiction from 2011, down from
136 in 2010. Recommended stories appeared in
20 magazines, just up from last year’s 18, although
the titles changed a bit. Anthologies had
48 recommended stories, up from last year’s 42,
plus an additional four from collections, same as
last year. Major anthologies were Engineering
Infinity and Eclipse Four, which each included
seven recommended stories, and Life on Mars,
which had five. Asimov’s led the magazines with
14 recommended titles, followed by F&SF with 11.
CRITICaL MaGaZINES
The New York Review of Science Fiction, which
has been a mainstay of the field for 23 years, is
facing a crisis after the October sale of their longtime
printer, Odyssey Press. According to editor
David G. Hartwell, ‘‘We are soliciting subscriptions
for $3 per issue thru July 30. As of August
1, we will either continue to use a subscription
model for PDF, with the option of expensive POD
issues, or we will abandon the subscription model
entirely, or something else.’’ There were 12 issues
printed in 2011, with the final issue to be mailed
early 2012.
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts suffered
from the Odyssey Press merger as well, publishing
only one issue in 2011, with a print run of 450, and
about 420 subscriptions. The second two issues of
2011 are scheduled to ship by the end of February.
JFA plans to continue with Yurchak Printing,
which merged with Odyssey.
Science Fiction Studies published three issues
in 2011 with a print run of about 900 monthly and
a subscriber base of around 800. The March issue
was devoted to ‘‘Slipstream SF.’’ Editor Arthur
78 / LOCUS February 2012
CONCLUSION
We keep hearing that print is dying, and science
fiction is dying – but we’re listing more books than
ever. There are fewer mass-market paperbacks out
there, but e-books seem to be taking their place,
providing huge amounts of new fiction in formats
that don’t need any shelf space. For us, the problem
is figuring out a way to track all those e-books.
Even more so than POD, e-books offer writers an
inexpensive way to publish their works without
having to go through the submission process
required by traditional publishers. Some notable
books have appeared first in electronic format, but
unfortunately so have tons of trash. Do we count
works made available for free on author websites,
or only e-books that get ISBNs and make it onto
Amazon? (Making Amazon our sole criterion
for ‘‘real’’ publication would really grate.) Or
only e-books from recognized publishers? It’s a
complicated situation, and so far we have no real
answers.
As for trends, paranormal romance may be
peaking for adults; the number of new titles
actually went down slightly for the first time since
we started counting, but YA paranormal novels
were almost double last year’s number, leaving
paranormal romances up overall for the fifth
year in a row. Young-adult dystopian and postapocalypse
SF continues to build; while we don’t
have definitive figures, the number of YA fiction
titles described as dystopian or post-apocalyptic
have been climbing steadily for the last five years,
LOCUS RECOMMENDED SHORT FICTION
2011 ’10 ’09 ’08 ’07 ’06 ’05
Anthologies 28 42 69 48 42 34 19
Asimov’s 14 15 15 18 22 25 32
F&SF 11 10 9 19 24 20 21
Subterranean 6 9 6 - 6 - 5
Clarkesworld 5 8 6 2 3 - -
Tor.com 4 6 7 3 - - -
Collections 4 4 6 6 6 14 10
Fantasy 3 5 4 2 - 2 -
Conjunctions 2 - - - - - -
Lightspeed 2 6 - - - - -
Analog 2 4 4 2 2 5 9
Interzone 2 2 5 3 2 3 4
Electric
Velocipede 2 - 1 - - 1 -
Black Static 2 - - - - - -
Apex 1 3 - - - - -
Bull Spec 1 - - - - - -
Cosmos 1 - 1 - - - 1
Harpers 1 - - - 1 - -
Flurb 1 - - - - 1 -
Chizine 1 - - - - - -
Beneath Ceaseless
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Evans says Science Fiction Studies will offer
electronic-only subscriptions in 2012 for the first
time. New rates are available online at .
Aqueduct Press launched a new critical magazine
in January 2011, The Cascadia Subduction
Zone: A Literary Quarterly. Four issues of
between 24 and 28 pages were published, including
SF and fantasy book reviews, critical essays,
poems, and profiles of featured artists, with color
reproductions of art by the featured artists on the
cover and a b&w interior. The magazine is available
in print and electronic formats at .
There were three issues of academic journal
Foundation, all dated 2010. According to Graham
Sleight, the journal is still catching up on backlog
from 15 in 2007 to 101 in 2011. There has been
a boom in young-adult titles in general; a lot of
authors, particularly those being dropped by their
publishers because of low sales, decided a few
years ago that the real money was in YA and we’re
seeing the result of their efforts now. One trend
that seems definitely on its way out is the mash-up;
parody and satire will never go away completely,
but only genre title upcoming that we know about
is George R.R. Washington’s a Game of Moans.
Every year we hear complaints there isn’t enough
good SF out there. This year in particular we’ve
heard complaints there’s not enough hard SF,
which may have some validity depending on how
you define ‘‘hard’’ when quantum mechanics and
nanotech are part of the cutting edge of science.
There’s also the problem of finding the core SF
and fantasy buried in all the paranormals, urban
fantasies, and YA dystopias. Still, old-fashioned
print books are coming out in ever-larger numbers,
with more than enough good stuff to fill our
recommended reading list. What’s really changing
is the way readers find the books they want to read;
with so many brick-and-mortar bookstores closing,
more and more readers have to wade through an
online flood of books of questionable quality to
find the good stuff. We hope our recommendations
and reviews help.
–Carolyn Cushman �
but subscriptions remain stable.
Vector, the critical journal of the British Science
Fiction Association, produced four issues in 2011.
Circulation was approximately 600. Niall Harrison
was editor for the Winter 2011 issue, with
Shana Worthen taking over as editor in Spring
2011. According to Worthen, there were ‘‘no
newsstand sales, but we experimented with selling
the Autumn issue, #268 on Diana Wynne Jones,
directly, and sold 50 copies that way.’’
There were five monthly issues of digital
magazine Salon Futura, ,
with interviews, critical articles, and non-fiction,
in addition to a monthly podcast. Issue #9, May
2011 will be the last issue for a while, pending a
hoped-for new funding source.
Scholarly magazine Extrapolation published
two issues with the Fall 2011 issue shipping in
January 2012. Circulation remains steady at 700.
Extrapolation will be published by Liverpool University
Press beginning with the Spring 2012 issue.
Peake Studies published two issues this year.
The subscriber base remains constant.
There were two issues of SF Commentary
in 2011, with reviews, reports on fanzines, and
interviews.
CONCLUSION
The professional magazines are seeing their
digital editions work for them finally, with circulations
turning back up after a decades-long
downward trend. All of these formats add to the
field, and it’s good to see digital media contributing
to the lot of the print magazines instead of
taking away.
Print, online, PDF, mobi, epub, app – all just different
media for distributing what is a burgeoning
short fiction field. We’re seeing even larger digital
and online audiences than before (not a huge
surprise since many of these venues are free), and
there are more, easier, cheaper devices available
every year. All that free fiction is a great deal for
the reader, but we worry about sustainability. For
now, there is more fine short fiction than any one
person could read, and that is a great thing. �

Long-time fan JaMES L. ‘‘RUSTY’’ HEVE-
LIN, 89, died December 27, 2011 at the VA Hospital
Hospice Center in Dayton OH.
Hevelin was born February 16, 1922, and
served in the Marines in the South Pacific during
WWII. He became active in fandom beginning
in the 1930s, and remained involved for the rest
of his life. Hevelin attended a meeting of the Los
Angeles Science Fiction Society in 1941, and attended
the third-ever Worldcon that same year.
He was a fanzine publisher (notably of Aliquot,
H-1661, and Badly) and contributor, book collector,
and longtime book dealer. He won the Down
Under Fan Fund in 1975, was fan guest of honor
at Worldcon in 1981, won the Big Heart Award
in 1986, and in 2003 received the Sam Moskowitz
Archive Award for excellence in science fiction
collecting. He was also part of the group that
kept PulpCon going after its 1972 debut, and he
chaired the ‘‘Detroit in ’82’’ Worldcon bid. He is
survived by three sons, and was predeceased in
June 2011 by a fourth.
RUSTY
by Joe Haldeman
Gay and I have known Rusty since the ’60s, and
have been close since the ’70s. He was one of a
small group who trekked down to Florida during
the Apollo Program, to watch the rockets go up and
benefit from the hospitality of fans Banks Mebane
and Joe Green. I think the earliest picture I have
of us together is from Tricon in 1976; I remember
we were pals when he was Fan Guest of Honor at
Denvention in 1981.
We traveled around a lot together, camping in the
warm months and conning in the cold ones. Rusty
drove our support vehicle, a ramshackle RV, when
Gay and I bicycled across the country in the ’90s.
He was one of the rare science fiction fans with
whom I could share memories of combat. He was in
the Marines in the Pacific in WWII, flying weatherreport
missions. One morning he was shaving on
some island, perhaps Peleliu, when a Japanese sniper
fired at him. The bullet went over Rusty’s head and
killed a soldier in the tent behind him. (He never
confirmed this, but maybe that convinced him that
a beard might be a good idea.)
He was a vastly accepting man, with endless
patience for the young and foolish (and the old and
clueless); everybody’s grandfather figure, but much
more fun to be with than your actual grandfather.
Many of us loved him, and he loved in return.
He used to say of old people when they died,
‘‘Well, he had a good long run.’’ Rusty had that
himself, not quite reaching 90. Selfishly, I wish he
could have made it into triple digits – but he did
have seventy years of bonus time, as they said in
his war; the bullet that missed him gifted us with a
80 / LOCUS February 2012
Obituaries
Rusty Hevelin (1985)
shared lifetime of camaraderie.
We shared a lack of belief in the supernatural, and
also a wry sense of our loss in that lack. It would be
nice to think of Rusty up there somewhere cranking
a ditto machine or sitting at a card table with Bob
Tucker, Waddie, Mike Glicksohn, Lou Tabakow,
Gordy Dickson, and my brother Jack, looking down
at us and pitying our everyday mundane trials while
they relax eternally in a con suite that never runs
dry. Perhaps we may hold that image for just a little
while, in fond memory.
–Joe Haldeman
LISTENING TO RUSTY
by Gary K. Wolfe
Like many others, I became
acquainted with Rusty in connection
with Joe and Gay
Haldeman, probably 30 or
so years ago, and possibly at
the International Conference
on the Fantastic in the Arts.
By then he was already well
on his way to becoming the
Gandalf of pulp fandom, but
I was barely aware of that at
the time; he seemed merely an
extraordinarily good-natured
fan, collector, and huckster
who had some great stories to
tell. It wasn’t until sometime
Rusty Hevelin, Gay Haldeman (1988)
Damon Knight, Rusty Hevelin (1980) Gary K. Wolfe, Rusty Hevelin, Gay Haldeman (2010)
later that I began to realize how deep and broad his
connections with the field really were. Philip José
Farmer had invited me along to a Midwestern con
sometime in the 1990s (Rivercon, I think), and at
one point I found myself at a table watching Phil,
Forrest Ackerman, and Julius Schwartz reminisce;
that was likely the first time I realized there was
a wealth of stories about Rusty, in addition to the
ones he himself told.
I’d been hanging out with a legend without
quite realizing it. During the ’90s my wife and I
enjoyed some very relaxed vacations with Rusty
and the Haldemans, exploring the Florida Keys,
and I never fully took advantage of the wealth of
SF history that was sitting on the porch. Instead,
we got preoccupied with such things as finding a
pineapple upside-down cake for Rusty – one of
his favorites – because he was the sort of person
you wanted to do things for, even though he never
remotely seemed needy. He was game for anything.
When, at the insistence of Charles Brown,
my wife and I decided to have a wedding at the
ICFA conference (we’d actually been married the
previous New Year’s Eve), Rusty immediately
volunteered to be the ring bearer, and somehow
invested with genuine dignity the preposterous
poolside spectacle of carrying a tiny ring on a giant
bed pillow we’d snatched from the hotel room.
Throughout all this, I came to realize that Rusty
was an acute reader, with a sharp critical mind belied
by his resonant cowboy drawl. He not only
kept up with much current fiction, but brought to
it something like six decades of reading SF as it
appeared to the fans of the era. He knew Heinlein
and Asimov and everyone else, of course, but he
also remembered what it was like to discover their
work when they were first being published (and to
meet Heinlein as a fellow fan at the 1941 Denver
Worldcon). The ways in which SF was read and
received by its contemporary
fans is a part of literary history
too easily lost to critics
and historians, and Rusty was
an embodiment of that reading
history. Charles Brown,
the founder of this magazine,
certainly never lacked confidence
in his own strong opinions
and memories, but Rusty
was among the few he would
defer to. When a young Locus
employee, Amelia Beamer,
expressed an interest in learning
what it was like to read the
pulps, he suggested she talk to
Rusty. I sat in on a couple of
those conversations – Rusty
was delighted to be asked

about such things – and probably learned as much
as she did. Of course I should have taken notes; of
course I should have followed up. But by then I
was thinking of Rusty as an old friend and a great
drinking buddy – even though for him it was always
milk – and not as an invaluable resource we
might lose someday. I guess it’s a little like discovering
that the kindly old fiddler who lives upstairs
used to play with Shostakovich: you know
you ought to take advantage of it, but by then it
seems more important to get him that glass of milk
and pineapple cake, and to just chat.
–Gary K. Wolfe
Writer HOWaRD HOPKINS, 50, died of a
heart attack January 12, 2012 near his home in Old
Orchard Beach MN. Hopkins wrote a number of
horror short stories, publishing in small press magazines
in the ’80s and ’90s, and later self-published
many horror novels through his Golden Peril Press.
He also wrote and edited for small press Moonstone
Books, and published over 30 Westerns under the
name Lance Howard. Hopkins was born December
12, 1961 in Biddeford MN. He is survived by his
wife Dominique.
Publisher, editor, and fan ROBERT E. BRINEY,
77, died in November 2011. Briney was active in
Chicago fandom in the ’50s and ’60s, and was
a co-founder of Advent:Publishing in 1956. He
edited anthology Shanadu in 1953, and under
pseudonym Andrew Duane contributed novella
‘‘The Black Tower’’ (with Brain J. McNaughton)
to the same volume. He also edited reference book
SF Bibliographies: an annotated Bibliography
of Bibliographical Works on Science Fiction and
Fantasy Fiction (1972), edited 18 issues of The
Rohmer Review from 1970-83, and produced 149
issues of his fanzine Contact Is Not a Verb from
Dear Locus,
I edit The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of
the Year anthology series for Night Shade Books.
The sixth volume in the series will be published
in March 2012, and the seventh should appear in
March 2013.
I am currently reading for the 2012 volume,
which will cover stories first published between
1 January and 31 December 2012. I am looking
for stories from all branches of science fiction and
fantasy: space opera to cyberpunk, fairy tales to
the slipstream, or anything else that might qualify.
If in doubt, please send it. Please note: This is a
reprint anthology.
I work on a tight deadline, and need to see work
as early as possible. With that in mind, the submission
deadline for this year’s book is 1 October
2012. Anything sent after this deadline will reach
me too late. If a magazine, anthology, or collection
you are in or you edit is coming out before 31 December
2012 please send galleys or manuscripts
so that I can consider the stories in time.
Where possible, I prefer to receive book-length
submissions in print.
Anything else can be sent to me via email. I prefer
.rtf or .doc files. PDFs are acceptable, but are
inconvenient. I strongly suggest that authors check
with their publishers that they are sending review
copies out to me, as I don’t have the resources to
follow-up every publisher to get material.
When sending material please put ‘‘BEST SF/F
of the Year’’ on the envelope.
Jonathan Strahan
PO Box 544
Mt Lawley WA 6929
Australia
E-mail submissions, recommendations, or information
on publications can be sent to me via email
at: .
NOTE TO PUBLISHERS
I am eager to see and be able to consider the
work you are publishing. If you are producing a
1980-2006. Briney was an expert on mysteries and
supernatural literature, and on bibliography, and a
frequent attendee at Pulpcon and other conventions.
Robert Edward Briney was born December 2,
1933 in Benton Harbor MI. He attended Northwestern
University, and earned his PhD in mathematics
from MIT in 1961. He taught at MIT and Purdue
early on, but settled at Salem State University
in Massachusetts beginning in 1968, where he
remained as a professor until retirement in 2008.
Briney, who had no immediate family, was discovered
dead in his home in late November 2011.
Agent, editor, and publisher GLENN LORD, 80,
died December 31, 2011 in Pasadena TX.
Lord is best known as a champion of the works
of Robert E. Howard, and acted as agent for the
Howard estate starting in 1965. Lord worked tirelessly
to keep Howard’s work available in English
and in countless translations, and brought many of
his unpublished works into print. In his journal The
Howard Collector (18 issues from 1961-73), Lord
published rare and unpublished work by Howard,
along with news, essays, and indices;
he produced a special final edition
of The Howard Collector in summer
2011. Lord wrote a landmark work on
Howard, The Last Celt: a Bio-Bibliography
of Robert Ervin Howard
(1976); co-edited Robert E. Howard:
Selected Letters: 1923-1930 (1990,
with Rusty Burke & S.T. Joshi); and
edited Robert E. Howard: Selected
Letters: 1931-36 (1991). He received
a World Fantasy special convention
award in 1978, was guest of honor at
the Centennial Robert E. Howard Days
festival in Cross Plains TX (2006), and
guest of honor at PulpCon 36 (2007).
Locus Letters
Glenn Lord (1979)
magazine, a chapbook, a collection, or anthology
with any original stories in it please let me know.
While I prefer not to accept email submissions for
book-length works as a rule, I am happy to talk to
publishers about making exceptions where necessary.
The important thing, for me, is to make sure that
I get to consider the best science fiction and fantasy
published during 2012.
I do not need to receive manuscripts from authors
of stories from venues that it’s likely I already
receive regularly (I get Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF,
Interzone, Postscripts, etc., but not many of the
smaller ’zines and publications).
If you are publishing online, please email me
copies of your stories at . This is particularly important for stories
published between October and December,
which may otherwise be overlooked. I do not require
print-outs of online publications (I regularly
read Tor.com, IGMS, Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld,
Lightspeed, Apex, etc. online).
Please do not send an SASE. This is not a submission,
and I’m unable to return manuscripts or
respond directly to stories sent to me.
–Jonathan Strahan
Dear Locus,
I edit the anthology series The Best Horror of
the Year (Night Shade Books) and am currently
reading for the fifth volume, which will include all
material published in 2012.
I am looking for stories from all branches of horror:
from the traditional supernatural to the borderline,
including high-tech SF horror, supernatural
stories, psychological horror, dark thrillers, or anything
else that might qualify. If in doubt, send it.
This is a reprint anthology so I am only reading material
published in or about to be published in 2012.
Submission deadline for stories is December 1st
2012. Anything sent after this deadline will reach
me too late. If a magazine, anthology, or collection
Glenn Richard Lord was born November 17,
1931 in Pelican LA. He served in the Korean War
and worked as a manager in a paper warehouse, and
discovered Howard’s work in the early ’50s when
he read collection Skull-Face and Others (1946).
Lord soon devoted himself to collecting Howard’s
fiction, poetry, and letters, eventually amassing a
huge collection of Howard’s material, including
hundreds of then-unpublished stories, most of
which he helped shepherd into print.
French SF writer RICHaRD BESSIÈRE, 88,
died in his home town of Béziers on December 22,
2011. Bessière began publishing in 1951 with a
series of pulpy SF stories, Conquérants de l’Univers
[Conquerors of the Universe]. He went on to publish
other adventure series, and a number of standalone
novels blending horror and SF, including Escale
chez les vivants [Stop-Over among the Living]
(1960), Les Maîtres du silence [The Masters of
Silence] (1965), and Cette lueur qui venait des
ténèbres [That Light Which Came from the Dark]
(1967). Bessière also wrote almost 100 spy thrillers
under the pen name F.-H. Ribes.
French SF writer LOUIS
THIRION, 88, died December 9,
2011 in Paris. Thirion was born
October 25, 1923, and published
his first novel, Waterloo, morne
plaine [Waterloo, Sad Plain] in
1964. During his 40-year career he
wrote over 30 novels (many of them
dystopian stories of environmental
disasters), several radio dramas for
Théâtre de l’Étrange, and the play
Les Pillules.�
you’re in or you publish is coming out in December,
you can send me galleys or manuscripts so that I
can judge the stories in time. No e-mail submissions.
I strongly suggest that authors check with
their publishers that they are sending review copies
to me as I don’t have time or energy to nag publishers
to get me material. I request it once (maybe
twice) and that’s it.
There is a summation of ‘‘the year in horror’’ in
the front of the volume. This includes novels, nonfiction,
art books, and ‘‘odds and ends’’ – material that
doesn’t fit elsewhere but that I feel might interest the
horror reader. But I must be aware of this material
in order to mention it. The deadline for receipt of
material for this section is December 15th, 2012.
Ellen Datlow
Best Horror of the Year Volume Five
PMB 391
511 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10011-8436
I do not want to receive manuscripts from authors
of stories from venues that it’s likely I already receive
(like Interzone, Black Static, Crimewave, Cemetery
Dance, Postscripts, Weird Tales, F&SF and the
other digests, etc.) or from anthologies and collections,
unless I don’t have or can’t get that anthology
or collection. Please contact your publisher and ask
him/her to send me the magazine or book.
For online publications, I prefer print submissions,
so if your publisher doesn’t send them out
please do so yourself. I will also accept printouts
of stories produced and first ‘‘published’’ in 2012
as podcasts.
Please do not send a SASE. If I choose a story
you will be informed. If you want to confirm that I‘ve
received something, enclose a self-addressedstamped
postcard and I will let you know the date it
arrived. For stories that appear on the web, please
send me (or have the publisher send me) print-outs
of your story.
–Ellen Datlow �
LOCUS February 2012 / 81

Thinking about the past year and the major
events that took place, while they were
definitely Big Deals, it’s hard to quantify how
much each impacted the state of publishing as we
know it. We are certainly seeing e-books secure
their place in the market, perhaps not pushing
mass markets out, but definitely picking up much
of the same readership. We did notice that reprint
numbers are dropping, but we assume it again
has to do with the growing e-book population
and since you don’t “reprint” electronic versions,
those numbers will probably continue to fall.
The long-foretold closure of Borders, while still
a huge event, wasn’t as bad for publishers as it
would have been if it had happened when they
first started showing signs of going under two
years before; at least this way everyone had some
warning. Still more independent bookstores
closed throughout the year; a few have been able
to secure some of the Borders audience, but if
people keep using Amazon for everything soon
there won’t be anywhere to go and fondle books!
Amazon has officially plunged into publishing
with their various genre imprints, notably for
our field 47North, though we haven’t seen any
print books from them yet. All said, there were
more print books than ever, and the field is still
as vibrant and exciting as ever.
THIS ISSUE
The February issue is always a rough one. I
spent both of my nights last weekend checking
recommended titles against our database while
the girls fell asleep next to me in bed watching
movies. There have been a few late nights here
in the office, one long night with Francesca and
I finishing up some writing, and I’m pretty sure
Carolyn worked right through last weekend to
get the Book Summary done. We had a large
number of hands on the Magazine Summary,
starting with our intern Bob chasing down info
from the publishers and ending up with an assortment
of Locusites writing small sections
of it including Heather writing up the online
magazines, Francesca writing up the critical
magazines, etc. Hence the lack of byline; it
would have been shorter to say who didn’t work
on it. Kudos to Tim and Kirsten for making it all
fit. We went back and forth several times between
not having enough space to having too much to
not having enough again, but in the end it has
to fit somehow, and they did their magic well.
Thanks also to all the folks who put time into get-
Editorial Matters
ting the list together, reading and discussing the
various titles – most especially Jonathan Strahan
for several looong Skype calls and Gary Wolfe
for answering his phone every time I called with
questions about titles. I’m pretty sure I would
have let me go to voicemail…
Once again, it’s time for the Locus Poll &
Survey. We’re reworking some of the questions
to reflect the shift to electronic books, though
we still saw plenty of print books and it’s clear
that important books will continue to come out
in print for now. There will be the annual paper
pullout, but of course it’s a boon to us if you fill
it out directly online at
or use the link from the homepage. It saves hours
and hours of work on our end and the Locus
minions will thank you for it.
Subscribers of record who return ballots will
receive a free issue when we count ballots in
May, so be sure to include your name and subscription
number (for print subscribers) or e-mail
(for digital subscribers) exactly as we have it
in your subscriber information. To qualify, you
must make an effort to vote in some categories at
least and fill out the Survey as well. Photocopies
are acceptable from ultimate collectors.
Please don’t vote for any item more than once,
with the exception of first novels, which can also
be included in best SF, fantasy, or YA categories.
The lists on pages 42-44 are recommendations
only, and they also populate the pull-down lists
online, but remember: you can vote for anything
else you want. There is space for it if you want to
write in votes; the pull-down just makes it easier
to tally. Please fill in as completely as you can,
with at minimum title and author. The categories
are mostly self-explanatory, except for short
fiction: a novella runs 17,500 to 60,000 words,
a novelette 7,500 to 17,500 words, and a short
story up to 7,500 words. A book containing stories
by several different authors is an anthology;
a book with multiple stories by a single author is
a collection. These are different from the Hugo
and Nebula Awards eligibility requirements. We
will tally all the votes and present the winners at
the Locus Awards Weekend.
LOCUS aWaRDS
The Locus Awards are scheduled to be presented
on June 16, 2012 in Seattle during a
weekend of events in association with Clarion
West and Northwest Media Arts. As far as our
sponsorship with the Science Fiction Museum
and SF Hall of Fame, it has become more
and more problematic to have a partnership of
events with them, and it looks we’ll be holding
separate weekends this year – them with their
Hall of Fame induction and us with our Locus
Awards ceremony. We initially moved the awards
to Seattle in 2006 when Therese Littleton of the
SFM offered to sponsor it, flying us in, hosting
the event, taking care of hotel rooms, etc. in order
to help boost the SF Hall of Fame event; Paul
Allen’s Vulcan had just taken over the SFHoF
from Robin Wayne Bailey, merging it with the
SF Museum in 2004. Over the past five years,
while our event has been growing each year and
now has panels, writing workshops, readings and
signings by favorite authors, up to the point of
needing new facilities, on their end, Therese has
left the museum, their presentation of the SF Hall
of Fame induction has dwindled down to almost
not happening at all a couple years ago, and their
contribution to our event has gone down with
it. Their primary focus has always been more
media/film/pop culture related, and while we
still like the folks who directly run the SFM, and
enjoy their event and the museum, to simplify
things we will have our event independent of
theirs, though still in Seattle, the weekend after
their induction ceremony. It will be a great weekend,
nonetheless, so mark your calendars now!
RUSTY HEVELIN
I was very sad to hear the news about Rusty. I’d
been keeping up on second-hand news about him
via Gary Wolfe since he had an incident early
last year, and knew that things were falling apart
a bit for him. Regardless, I was still holding out
hope that he might recover enough to make it out
to ICFA this year when I heard that he’d died.
I’ll miss his stories, and that big friendly drawl
of his. My condolences to those that loved him.
NExT ISSUE
Our next issue is a Forthcoming Books issue,
with publishing schedules of titles through
December 2012, planned interviews with Paul
Di Filippo (whose interview was bumped from
this issue during one of the “not enough space!”
periods) and Sarah Pinborough, and the Nebula
Awards ballot if we get it in time, along with all
of our regular news, reviews, and articles. See
you next time!
–Liza Groen Trombi�

Locus Survey
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[ ] book cover blurb [ ] other_____________________
Do you own any of the following?
[ ] personal computer [ ] plasma/HDTV [ ] tablet
[ ] next gen console (Wii, PS3, etc.) [ ] TiVo/DVR [ ] smartphone
[ ] e-book reader (Kindle, etc.) [ ] iPod/MP3 player [ ] digital camera
If you own a computer, how many _______ and what kind(s)?
[ ] PC [ ] Mac [ ] Linux operated [ ] other________________
If you own an e-book reader, what do you read on it?
[ ] books [ ] magazines [ ] other___________________
How many hours per week do you spend online?
[ ] 0 [ ] 1-2 [ ] 3-5 [ ] 6-9 [ ] 10-19 [ ] 20+
Do you have a cable or DSL connection? [ ] yes [ ] no
Do you have a web page? [ ] yes [ ] no
Do you have a blog? [ ] yes [ ] no
Do you Twitter? [ ] yes [ ] no
Do you look at YouTube? [ ] yes [ ] no
Do you use social networking sites? [ ] yes [ ] no
Do you use peer-to-peer filesharing networks? [ ] yes [ ] no
Do you play MMORPGs or game online? [ ] yes [ ] no
Do you get your news online? [ ] yes [ ] no
Have you ever paid for downloaded music? [ ] yes [ ] no
Do you regularly listen to podcasts? [ ] yes [ ] no
Do you read Locus Online? [ ] yes [ ] no
Do you read any other online SF publications? [ ] yes [ ] no
Have you ever donated to an online publication? [ ] yes [ ] no
Which of the following online publications do you read regularly?
[ ] Abyss & Apex [ ] Flurb [ ] SF Site
[ ] Ansible [ ] Hub [ ] Strange Horizons
[ ] Blastr [ ] Intergalactic [ ] Subterranean
[ ] ChiZine Medicine Show [ ] Tangent Online
[ ] Clarkesworld [ ] Lightspeed [ ] Tor.com
[ ] Fantasy [ ] SFRevu [ ] other __________
How long have you been reading SF regularly?
[ ] 1 year [ ] 6-10 years [ ] 21-30 years
[ ] 2-5 years [ ] 11-20 years [ ] 31+ years
Does SF form the major part of your pleasure reading? [ ] yes [ ] no
Do you consider yourself a book collector? [ ] yes [ ] no
If yes, do you primarily collect:
[ ] hardcovers [ ] paperbacks [ ] magazines
[ ] everything [ ] other_____________________________
Do you like:
[ ] SF [ ] fantasy [ ] horror/dark fantasy
[ ] hard science [ ] high/heroic [ ] psychological
[ ] social science [ ] humorous [ ] splatter
[ ] adventure [ ] romantic [ ] supernatural
[ ] other_____________________
How many new hardcover books do you buy per month?
[ ] 0 [ ] 1 [ ] 2-4 [ ] 5-10 [ ] 11+
How many per year?
[ ] 0 [ ] 1 [ ] 2-4 [ ] 5-10 [ ] 11+
How many new trade paperback books do you buy per month?
[ ] 0 [ ] 1 [ ] 2-4 [ ] 5-10 [ ] 11+
How many per year?
[ ] 0 [ ] 1 [ ] 2-4 [ ] 5-10 [ ] 11+
How many new paperback books do you buy per month?
[ ] 0 [ ] 1 [ ] 2-4 [ ] 5-10 [ ] 11+
How many per year?
[ ] 0 [ ] 1 [ ] 2-4 [ ] 5-10 [ ] 11+
Is most of the SF you buy: [ ] new [ ] used [ ] about equal
Where do you buy most of your SF?
[ ] chain stores [ ] online bookseller [ ] wholesale or discount stores
[ ] specialty stores [ ] mail order [ ] conventions
[ ] independent bookstores
Do you read fiction online? [ ] yes [ ] no
Short stories? [ ] yes [ ] no
Novels? [ ] yes [ ] no
Do you pay for e-fiction on a regular basis? [ ] yes [ ] no
How much did you generally pay for each piece of short fiction?
[ ] $0-$0.99 [ ] $1-$2.99 [ ] $3-$5.99 [ ] $6-$9.99 [ ] $10-$15.99 [ ] $16+
How much did you generally pay for each e-book?
[ ] $0-$0.99 [ ] $1-$2.99 [ ] $3-$5.99 [ ] $6-$9.99 [ ] $10-$15.99 [ ] $16+
Are you a member of the Science Fiction Book Club? [ ] yes [ ] no
Are you a member of a general book or video club? [ ] yes [ ] no
Do you subscribe to cable or satellite TV? [ ] yes [ ] no
Do you subscribe to Netflix? [ ] yes [ ] no
Which of the following print magazines do you read regularly?
[ ] Analog [ ] Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet [ ] Realms of Fantasy
[ ] Asimov’s [ ] NY Review of SF [ ] Weird Tales
[ ] F&SF [ ] Interzone [ ] other ____________
Have you ever attended a:
[ ] science fiction convention? [ ] Worldcon? [ ] neither
Did you attend the 2011 Worldcon? [ ] yes [ ] no
Do you: [ ] nominate [ ] vote for the Hugos?
How many conventions, aside from the Worldcon, did you attend last year?
[ ] 0 [ ] 1-2 [ ] 3-5 [ ] 6-10 [ ] 11+
Which of the following related subjects are you interested in?
[ ] movies [ ] Battlestar Galactica [ ] mainstream fiction
[ ] comics/graphic novels [ ] Doctor Who [ ] mystery fiction
[ ] science, non-fiction [ ] Fringe [ ] historical fiction
[ ] gaming, including RPGs [ ] Star Trek [ ] romance fiction
[ ] computer/video games [ ] Star Wars [ ] young-adult fiction
[ ] fanzines/small-press magazines
How many movies do you see each month?
Theater movies? [ ] 0 [ ] 1-2 [ ] 3-5 [ ] 6-10 [ ] 11+
TV/DVD movies? [ ] 0 [ ] 1-2 [ ] 3-5 [ ] 6-10 [ ] 11+
Mail to: LOCUS PUBLICATIONS, P.O. Box 13305, Oakland CA 94661

The 42nd annual Locus Awards ballot covers works that appeared in 2011. Do
not vote for the same work more than once, except Best First Novel, which may
also be listed as Best Novel. If you are voting for items not on our Recommended
Reading list, please give both author and title as well as place of appearance. A
Best
SF
Novel
Best
Fantasy
Novel
Best
Young-Adult
Novel
1___________________________________
Best 2___________________________________
First 3___________________________________
Novel 4___________________________________
5___________________________________
Best
Novella
1___________________________________
Best 2___________________________________
Novelette 3___________________________________
4___________________________________
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Best
Short Story
Best
Magazine
or Fanzine
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5___________________________________
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Locus Poll
free issue of Locus will be given for a filled-out Poll & Survey to subscribers of
record when we count them in May, so please use the exact name as subscribed
and your subscription number. Deadline for ballots is April 15, 2012. (See more
details on voting in Editorial Matters.)
If possible, please complete the survey and poll online at .
1___________________________________
1__________________________________
2___________________________________ Best 2__________________________________
3___________________________________ Book 3__________________________________
4___________________________________ Publisher 4__________________________________
5___________________________________
5__________________________________
Best
Anthology
Best
Single-Author
Collection
1__________________________________
Best Editor – 2__________________________________
Pro or Fan 3__________________________________
4__________________________________
5__________________________________
Best Artist –
Pro or Fan
Supplement to issue 613
1__________________________________
2__________________________________
3__________________________________
4__________________________________
5__________________________________
1__________________________________
2__________________________________
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4__________________________________
5__________________________________
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5__________________________________
1__________________________________
Best 2__________________________________
Non-fiction 3__________________________________
4__________________________________
5__________________________________
1__________________________________
Best 2__________________________________
Art Book 3__________________________________
4__________________________________
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