Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Author: Marion Deeds

The Peripheral: Amazon Original

Amazon has adapted William Gibson’s The Peripheral to a streaming show. To my disappointment, after three episodes, the show is like one of the book’s eponymous creations, an unpiloted peripheral; glossy, elegant, smart even, but lacking any spark of life.

The Peripheral takes place in two different timelines. One is set in 2032 in a world very much like ours, in a small town in the American southeast. The other is set in London in 2100, in a post-Jackpot world (the Jackpot is a convergence of natural and human-caused disasters reaching nearly extinction levels);

The Inheritance of Orquídea: A book filled with secrets, magic, and heart

The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina by Zoraida Córdova

2021’s The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina was practically a perfect book for me. It’s filled with fantastical magic that baffled me and thrilled me, and it brought to mind the early books of Isabel Allende. The Montoya family were complicated and realistic, in a real-world setting that simmers with magic and strangeness. While much of the story takes place in an undesignated “present” that seems very much like now (without pandemics), the history of Orquídea Divina’s life takes us to Ecuador in the late 1950s and early sixties.

WWWednesday: October 26, 2022

File 770 shared the Asimov’s Annual Readers Awards.

All of Us Villains by Amanda Foody and Christine Herman, and Leigh Bardugo’s Rule of Wolves, top the list of the Young Adult Library Services Association’s winners of best YA reads for 2022.

Back to the Future, the Musical, is coming to the US. (This article may be behind a paywall.)

Kadija Abdalla Bajaber won the first Ursula K. LeGuin Award for fiction, for The House of Rust.

October 26th, 2022. Marion Deeds | World Wide Wednesday | no comments |

The Nectar of Nightmares: Long may Gidney write!

The Nectar of Nightmares by Craig Laurance Gidney

It’s horror season for me, the time of year where I usually settle in with a cozy haunted house story, but sometimes branch out into the region of the genuinely horrifying or the truly weird. Craig Laurance Gidney’s short story collection The Nectar of Nightmares, published in 2022, fits that bill. As with most collections, I loved several, and a few were misses for me. This is even more likely to happen with a horror collection than,

WWWednesday: October 19, 2022

Trick or Treat! One commenter selected at random gets a copy of Craig Laurance Gidney’s story collection The Nectar of Nightmares.

Shehan Karunatilaka won the Booker Prize for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.

Dame Carmen Callil, who founded the feminist Virago Press, passed away at the age of 84. Virago reissued classic works by women that had been allowed to languish as well as popular fiction of previous decades that had also faded from memory or been erased. In 1972,

October 19th, 2022. Marion Deeds | Giveaway!, World Wide Wednesday | 5 comments |

What Lives in the Woods: A mysterious MG haunted house story

What Lives in the Woods by Lindsay Currie

Ginny — or Gin — Anderson is looking forward to the summer writing workshop she’s going to attend with her best friend Erica, in their hometown of Chicago, until Dad upends the family’s plans because of a job. He’d going to restore a century-old house-turned-hotel, The Woodmoor Manor, in Michigan. The family will live there while he works.

This sounds terrible to Gin and her older brother Leo. While Leo is soon appeased by the news that Saugatuck, the nearby small town,

WWWednesday: October 12, 2022

Rest in peace, Angela Lansbury, who passed away October 11, 2022 at the age of 96.

In honor of the season, Fangoria gives a critique of the Ray Bradbury classic Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Melanie Walsh is a scientist, used to working with data, and like many of us, she discovered just how difficult it is to find the answer to a simple question; how many copies of a certain book have been sold?

This little video mocks every folk horror film ever made. Depending upon how your colleagues feel about folk art/modern art,

October 12th, 2022. Marion Deeds | World Wide Wednesday | 9 comments |

WWWednesday: October 5, 2022

Sequencing the Neanderthal genome was a winner (A Nobel prize for medicine winner) for Svante Paabo, the son of a previous Nobel prize winner.

Baen Books’ annual adventure story contest is open for submissions, closing February 1, 2023. See the article and the site for details.

File 770 shares the first Utopia Awards. Becky Chambers took one for A Psalm for the Wild-Built.

Entertainment Weekly has a long and rather touching article about the second Black Panther film,

October 5th, 2022. Marion Deeds | World Wide Wednesday | no comments |

WWWednesday: September 28, 2022

File770 discusses how the Chicago Worldcon Community Fund extended memberships and increased inclusion for people who would otherwise have been unable to participate.

Teen writers in the Los Angeles area can submit their short fiction to the Tomorrow Prize science fiction contest. Details are in File 770’s article.

Charles Payseur takes up the debate of “Who Should Really Win a Fan Hugo?”

David Levithan wrote an eloquent and scary column for the Washington Post about the new heart of book censorship and what these censors’ true goals are.

September 28th, 2022. Marion Deeds | World Wide Wednesday | no comments |

WWWednesday: September 21, 2022

Fiyah’s Ignyte awards were announced on Saturday. P.Djeli Clark took home Best Adult Novel for A Master of Djinn; Best Young Adult Novel went to Darcie Littlebadger for A Snake Falls to Earth; Best Novella was awarded to Shingai Ngeri Kagunda for This is How to Stay Alive. View all the award winners here.

(You can hear Shingai Ngeri Kagunda read another story here.)

Charlie Jane Anders is now reviewing for the Washington Post and here is her inaugural column.

September 21st, 2022. Marion Deeds | World Wide Wednesday | 2 comments |

Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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