IROSF Suspending Publication

Seattle, WA, 12/30/2009 - After six years of publication the Internet
Review of Science Fiction (irosf.com) will cease operations after the
February, 2010 issue. Publisher L Blunt "Bluejack" Jackson and Editor
Stacey Janssen expressed their gratitude to all the subscribers, con-
tributors, authors, and especially the volunteers who made IROSF such
a success since its first issue in January, 2004.

Continuous financial shortfalls added to the challenges of publishing
IROSF, and Jackson has expressed his intent to turn to new challenges
related to the economy and logistics of Internet publishing. "What we
learned with IROSF and AEon Speculative Fiction was that neither tra-
ditional nor community-driven economic models met our needs, and that
the complexity of managing a distributed volunteer pool burned people
out, despite a steady increase in revenue and readership. Our plan is
to use this knowledge, and the ready availability of new distribution
channels, to create the kind of environment that would have empowered
the editors to achieve the success that IROSF's superb content always
deserved."

Press Contact:
L. Blunt Jackson
bluejack@quintamid.com
206.683.9825

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SemiProzine Category Saved!

A proposal brought to this year's WorldCon would have eliminated the SemiProzine category for the Hugo award. This is not without reason: It's a rare year that Locus does win this award. Since 1996 only once has it happened (2005: Ansible).

In response to this proposal, many semiprozine publishers banded together to object, and to float some alternate ideas that would bring the definition of semiprozine more in-line with current reality.

As of this writing Cheryl Morgan tweeted from the WSFS Business Meeting: "Semiprozine now definitely safe for a couple of years."

According to Cheryl, the motion was defeated 73-32, and a committee formed to review the category.

R.I.P, Charles N. Brown

(Originally posted at Locus Online News)


Charles N. Brown, 1937-2009 - posted at 7/13/2009 09:46:00 AM PT
Locus publisher, editor, and co-founder Charles N. Brown, 72, died peacefully in his sleep July 12, 2009 on his way home from Readercon.

Charles Nikki Brown was born June 24, 1937 in Brooklyn NY, where he grew up. He attended the City College of New York, taking time off from 1956-59 to serve in the US Navy, and finished his degree (BS in physics and engineering) at night on the GI Bill while working as a junior engineer in the '60s. He married twice, to Marsha Elkin (1962-69), who helped him start Locus, and to Dena Benatan (1970-77), who co-edited Locus for many years while he worked full time. He moved to San Francisco in 1972, working as a nuclear engineer until becoming a full-time SF editor in 1975. The Locus offices have been in Brown's home in the Oakland hills since 1973.

Brown co-founded Locus with Ed Meskys and Dave Vanderwerf as a one-sheet news fanzine in 1968, originally created to help the Boston Science Fiction Group win its Worldcon bid. Brown enjoyed editing Locus so much that he continued the magazine far beyond its original planned one-year run. Locus was nominated for its first Hugo Award in 1970, and Brown was a best fan writer nominee the same year. Locus won the first of its 29 Hugos in 1971.

During Brown's long and illustrious career he was the first book reviewer for Asimov's; wrote the Best of the Year summary for Terry Carr's annual anthologies (1975-87); wrote numerous magazines and newspapers; edited several SF anthologies; appeared on countless convention panels; was a frequent Guest of Honor, speaker, and judge at writers' seminars; and has been a jury member for various major SF awards.

As per his wishes, Locus will continue to publish, with executive editor Liza Groen Trombi taking over as editor-in-chief with the August 2009 issue.

A complete obituary with tributes and a photo retrospective will appear in the August issue.

First ever Gemmell Award winners announced.

On Friday, June 19, 2009, the first ever David Gemmell Legend Prize ( a fan voted award for fantasy novels and works) was awarded to Polish author Andrzej Sapowski for his novel, Blood of the Elves..


With a reported voter base of over 10,000 readers, the Gemmell Prize was established to recognize works written in the spirit of the late British author, whose 1984 novel Legend has never gone out of print.


An initial pool of 87 nominees from worldwide publishing houses was narrowed to a short list of 5 finalists in early April.


For his inaugural win, Sapkowski receives a replica battle axe, a depiction of the weapon “Snaga” featured in Gemmell's books. The runners-up (Joe Abercrombie The Last Argument of Kings (Pyr, Gollancz), Juliet Marillier The Heir to Seven Waters (TOR UK), Brandon Sanderson The Hero of Ages (TOR), Brent Weeks The Way of Shadows (Orbit)) also receive a miniature version of the prize.


Deborah J. Miller (award administrator and fantasy author) was pleased with the outcome of the event. "Our winning author is already a huge star in Europe and winning the award will hopefully ensure new readers experience his work in the excellent English translation from Gollancz. Genre fantasy is often dismissed as being simply gung-ho or macho, as people outside genre circles tend to imagine it's all about epic battles, weapons and warriors – in fact, it is all of those things and so much more. Contemporary fantasy fiction is about far more than escape to other realities. Freed of the constraints and preconceptions of other kinds of fiction, it holds up a mirror to reflect on this world and time through the prism of vivid characters and enthralling drama that engage the imagination like no other genre."

Graham Edwards -- Internet Press Release

UK fantasy and SF author Graham Edwards, best known for his epic Dragoncharm saga, has entered the blogosphere. His new SF&F blog – called, unsurprisingly, Graham Edwards Blog – is a personal pot-pourri of commentary, review, trivia, nostalgia and the occasional bit of shameless self-promotion.

Says Edwards: "If you're a fan of genre fiction, science and speculation in all its forms, this is the blog for you. As to the content, well, it's a kind of conservation scheme really. I'm releasing into the wild all the stuff in my head I can't find a place for in my fictional output."

Will Graham Edwards's "stuff" learn to hunt for itself and survive in the big blog-eat-blog world? Visit grahamedwards.blogspot.com and monitor its progress for yourself.

A Look Back at a Tributary of the Slipstream

Michael Chabon, who won the 2001 Pultizer Prize for a novel about a couple of comic book nerds, made his big splash in the SF world with the 2007 publication of his alternate history novel The Yiddish Policeman's Union. Thanks to this book, the once-mainstream writer soon found himself the recipient of both a Hugo and a Nebula, but Chabon had always been active in the murky area between the speculative genres and the mainstream—even if he received more attention from the latter than from the former. Indeed, in his editorial for the October 1998 issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction, David G. Hartwell insisted that "[n]o one talks about slipstream but us sf genre geeks," but I consider Chabon's 2004 all-original anthology McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories an example of just such a mainstream voice finally weighing in on the same sorts of issues that come up when genre folks start talking slipstream.

In essence, I see the ostensibly genre-bending stories in MECOAS as a significant part of—or at least counterpart to—a corresponding movement within the genre of speculative fiction, a movement that has only gained more momentum in the last few years. Whether or not we ought to call this movement "slipstream" is a question that lies beyond the scope of this review, but I will be using the term in its broadest possible sense; I recognize that I have my choice of imprecise terms—interstitial, genre-defying, postmodern, mainstream crossover, and so on—so I've simply selected the most euphonious.

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The Top Ten Things I Can’t Do with My Kindle

I love my Kindle. I do. I love its white frame and its little screen. I love the way I can make the font bigger and bigger, so that I can pretend I no longer need trifocals. I love the way it brings me books in the middle of the night, when I need them the most.

But my Kindle has drawbacks. I learned this when I read the instruction manual, which warned me about all kinds of things, like battery life and how to preserve my internet connection.

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There's No Place Like Home

The 1939 cinematic masterpiece The Wizard of Oz achieved many distinctions. It is among the most watched and beloved films of all time, and it is often ranked as one of the 10 best movies ever made. Its story has also shaped America's cultural consciousness to an extent that may transcend any other movie. This year, the seventieth anniversary of The Wizard of Oz's film debut, we find its story alive in the memorable quotations it passed on, the spinoffs such as The Wiz and Wicked it inspired, and even in the number of irreverent, audacious spoofs it has engendered on YouTube and elsewhere. "Over the Rainbow," its signature song, was voted the greatest movie song of all time by the American Film Institute, and every day Judy Garland sings it on a million TV screens and computer monitors throughout the world. Forever young, this classic musical fantasy continues to delight with an archetypal depth and richness that is inexhaustible and endlessly adaptable to new storylines of childhood innocence imperiled by evil and the failure of adults.

One of the film's insufficiently recognized themes is that of exile. Yet it is a dominant motif in The Wizard of Oz—exile is pervasive throughout the film. The movie demonstrates that a painful sense of exile and loss can occur even in a child's dream. During her psychic adventures, Dorothy repeatedly says, "There's no place like home." While a dry Kansas dust bowl may seem drab and unexciting compared to the vivid Technicolor wonders of Oz, Dorothy makes her homesickness clear by imaginatively populating Oz with three friendly workers from her farm in an effort to soften her sense of estrangement. She also sees Aunt Em in the Wicked Witch's crystal ball. Even the "Great and Terrible Wizard" is an import from Kansas named Professor Marvel. Like the others, he is intended to alleviate her loneliness. In the movie, Dorothy's exile and estrangement begins early, when she is at home in Kansas. Elmira Gulch, a heartless townswoman, has a court order for Dorothy's beloved dog (who bit Gulch), and she plans to take little Toto away and have him destroyed. Twelve-year-old Dorothy looks to her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry for help, but as is often the case in a child's world, adults seem distant and uncaring, concerned with grown-up matters and daily business.

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Top 10 for 2010

As I write this, just a few days before Christmas, the series of tubes we call the Internet is clogged with various and sundry Top 10 book lists for 2009. Unfortunately, 2009 was an abnormally busy year for me and I didn't make as much time for reading as I would have liked. In fact, I think I only read about ten books between January and December, well below my average, but I suppose that's what happens when you write three books in one year, two of which had extremely tight deadlines that forced them to be written simultaneously over the summer and early fall. That's not conducive to making the time or brainspace for reading, sadly. While this means I don't have a Top 10 of 2009 list to share with you, I would like to take a moment to point you toward two of this year's novels that I found exceptional.

The first is The Little Sleep, a debut mystery novel by sometimes horror writer Paul Tremblay. The narrator, South Boston P.I. Mark Genevich, suffers from narcolepsy and hypnagogic hallucinations, an affliction that allows Tremblay to utilize the stunningly surreal imagery his speculative fiction has become known for. The opening of the novel involves a possibly hallucinated woman who hires Genevich because she believes her fingers have been stolen and replaced with someone else's. Despite the surreal imagery, the story stays grounded enough in reality to make the mystery gripping and its solution resonant.

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Penultima Fermata

The decision has been made. The announcements have been sent.

IROSF will suspend publication after the February issue.

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