"The Immortality Game" (http://www.fantasy-magazine.com/new/new-fiction/the-immortality-game/) made it onto the Locus Recommended Reading List along with a whole bunch of more illustrious stories.
Locus Online ““ posts from Locus Magazine » 2011 Recommended Reading List
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
It’s that time again! Once again I have created this post for consolidating fantasy and science fiction award eligibility round-ups. If you are an F&SF writer, editor, podcast, or publisher working in comics, fiction or games, I hope you’ll let people know what you have that they should be reading.
Past things I have written about why writers should do this include On Awards: To Be Pushy Or Not To Be Pushy (2014), The Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated Awards Process (2015), and To Eligibility Post or Not to Eligibility Post? (2016).
Want a sample post? Here’s mine for this year.
Here are the previous such round-up posts from 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020.
Here are the guidelines that save us both work. It’s best if you e-mail me to add your name and link. I need to know your name, what categories you fit in, and the single URL that lets people find the works. Fair warning: If I have to click through multiple links in order to figure out your name and which category you should be put in, it will slow me down and make me cranky.
I strongly suggest that you do this in a blog post rather than on social media, for multiple reasons, including: it’s hard for people to find stuff on social media sometimes; not everyone has a social media account; it affects search engine optimization; and the fact that it’ll be easier for you to find it yourself later on. I can and do point at Twitter or FB posts if that’s all that people have, but I think they are shortchanging themselves when they do it.
If you tweet yours and tag me, there’s a good chance I’ll miss it somehow. Feel free to remind me in e-mail so I don’t miss it a second time. I also reiterate since we’re in another paragraph that tweeting your award eligibility is, in my opinion, doing yourself a disservice. If you don’t have a blog, I am willing to host your award eligibility post on this one as a guest post. Okay, I’ll stop being so pedantic about this, but I’m not saying it for my own benefit.
Places to find similar lists:
A.C. Wise maintains a similar list here.
Here are the SFWA recommended reading lists. These lists are the suggestions made by members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and represent pieces they found particularly read-worthy over the course of the year. Appearance on the list is NOT the same thing as a Nebula nomination.
Novel
Novella
Novelette
Short Story
Games
Bradbury Award
Norton (Young adult/middle grade novels)
Here is the Coyotl Award Recommended List.
Here is the Hugo Award Nominees Wiki.
Astounding Award Eligibility
Not on the list? Feel free to give me the information via this webform. Please allow 24 hours for the form to be updated.
Writers & Editors
Publishers
...
Look! Mats Minnhagen has finished the cover for A SEED ON THE WIND, the Fathomless Abyss novella I’ve got covering out this October. The scene’s one that occurs early in the book and gets referenced again and again throughout, so this cover, which comes so close to what was in my head, delights me with the way it conveys the space of the story.
If you don’t know what the Fathomless Abyss is, it’s a shared world project created by Philip Athans involving myself, Jay Lake, Joe McDermott, Mel Odom, Mike Resnick, and Brad Torgersen. Books out in the series already include Philip Athans’ DEVILS OF THE ENDLESS DEEP and J.M. McDermott’s NIRVANA GATES. I had a lot of fun writing “A Querulous Flute of Bone” for the TALES FROM THE FATHOMLESS ABYSS anthology and just as much fun writing this novella, which is the first half of a pair, to be finished in A CAVERN RIPE WITH DREAMS. Charles A. Tan recently talked with me about it for S.F. Signal.
Here’s something from the first chapter:
One morning his father woke him from a nightmare. He was still young, perhaps six or eight. His father squatted on his heels besides Bill’s bedroll and shook his shoulder. When he woke, shuddering and gasping from dreams of strangle-fingered demons, feeling his breath still in jeopardy, his father didn’t say anything, just beckoned to him.
He followed at his father’s heels, towards the world and the great tube that the village of Poit clung to. At the end of each tunnel the space widened considerably, leaving places where shelves and ladders and catwalks could be stretched. And beyond them all you could see the abyss itself, stretching downward and upward into darkness.
The air was full of something. What was it?
Bill moved to the railing to see what was happening. His father said, “Sometimes the world opens and things fall in. This far down, we rarely see them. This is something you will remember all your life.”
Tiny things floated through the air all around him. He stretched out his palm and kept it motionless long enough that one drifted to be trapped in his palm. A seed, a brown seed. Attached to one end a tuft of hairs, fine and feathery, to carry it along. Carefully he raised his hand, examined it more closely. So small. As it neared his eye, it became no longer brown, ridges and swirls marked its surface in grays and greens and reds that somehow blended together to create the impression of brown from just a few inches farther away.
He closed his fingers around it, meaning to keep it. But it was so small that it wafted away even as his fingers moved.
He’d only seen things fall into the abyss. But these, so light, sometimes moved upward or downward, sometimes tugged sideways as though snatched by invisible hands. Thousands and thousands, swirling through the air.
He picked several from the ground around his feet. Gingerly, he put one between his teeth, crunching down.
The seed gave way, falling into woody shreds, tasting like nothing he’d ever tasted, a sweet roundness mixed with sharper, angrier notes. Not unpleasant, but awake. He swallowed the fragments, feeling them rough in his throat.
He gathered a painstaking handful, picking them from crevices. Other people were doing the same. How often did you get something like that without cost, like a gift from the universe?
He and his father stood for hours on the platform, hands resting on the stone balustrade, watching it. Almost everyone in the city came to see the phenomenon, even if their children had to carry them. People did not speak much, simply watched, as though storing it up.
...
(science fiction, short story) The bots were going to run Linus out of room soon, if they didn’t scavenge away some piece vital to the ship’s functioning and leave him choking on vacuum first. He didn’t think anyone else had these problems with their ship bots. Galina would say it was his own fault for encouraging them.
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