Tag Archives: science fiction

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Rocket Science: anthology open to submissions

Heads up, writers – I bring news from ian Sales. The Rocket Science anthology reading period is now open, so get yer subs in! Take it away, Ian:

Rocket Science, the anthology of authentic and realistic hard science fiction, opens its doors today to submissions. I’m looking for stories which realistically depict space travel and its hazards. But not exclusively: stories covering other areas of science and technology are welcome. Just as long as they are authentic and realistic.

Both fiction and non-fiction are wanted – between 1,000 and 6,000 words. Payment is GBP 10.00 per 1,000 words. See the guidelines page at Mutation Press and the antho’s own news blog for further information.

Well, you heard the man – get to it! I’ve got a couple of pieces in mind of my own, but – as usual – they have yet to be written. Better get a move on, hadn’t I?

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James White Award judging panel announced

Heads up, science fiction short story writery types: the James White Award has announced its judging panel for the 2011 contest! What’s the James White Award? I’m glad you asked…

The James White Award is an annual short story competition open to non-professional writers with the winner chosen by a panel of judges made up of professional authors and editors. This year’s award will be judged by the novelists Jon Courtenay Grimwood and Juliet E McKenna and by the publisher of Interzone, Andy Cox. Stories entered into the competition must be original and previously unpublished. Entry is free.

The James White Award was instituted to honour the memory of one of Ireland’s most successful science fiction authors, James White. To learn more about James White and his writing, visit www.sectorgeneral.com.

The prize for winning this year’s James White Award 2011 is £200 plus publication in Interzone, the leading UK science fiction magazine.

The closing date for this year’s competition is midnight (GMT) 31 January 2012.

Open to any writer from any country on the planet, though your story does need to be written in English. The other competition rules (and some helpful advice for folk thinking of entering) can be found on the JWA website. So go read, and then get writing. Good luck!

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Phoenix Pick announces series of new author showcase books

Here’s some news from sf small press Phoenix Pick; they’re doing a series of books pairing up established names in the genre with newer writers. From the press release:

The Phoenix Pick program pairs a veteran author with a newer writer, each contributing a story for a single, stand-alone edition within the series. Each of the two stories may be set in the same universe, or complement the other in some other manner.

This project offers less-established authors a new venue to sell their stories and also provides them with an exceptional opportunity to have their work introduced to science fiction and fantasy fans by current masters in the field.

It allows veteran authors the opportunity to provide newer authors of their own choosing a distinctive platform to launch or re-ignite their careers.

Mike Resnick, the series editor, is considered one of the most distinguished writers and editors in the genre. He has been nominated for a record 35 Hugo awards and has won the award five times. He is first on Locus magazine’s list of all-time award winners, living or dead, for short fiction, and fourth on the magazine’s list of science fiction’s all-time top award winners in all fiction categories.

Good to see people still trying new ideas in the dead-tree sphere. As I’ve said before, I don’t think print media is anywhere near over, though it’s definitely moving into a twilight phase… and as mass market models fade away, there becomes space to try new things with niches. One to keep an eye on.

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The Science Fiction Gateway

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For those of you not so deeply plugged in to the sf lit and fandom circuits of the intertubes, I’ll act as a repeater station for a signal worth passing on: venerable UK sf imprint Gollancz has announced its SFGateway project, which will integrate a growing backlist of classic sf titles in ebook formats with the also-forthcoming online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

Here’s the main meat from the press release, which you can read in full if you so wish:

Gollancz, the SF and Fantasy imprint of the Orion Publishing Group, announces the launch of the world’s largest digital SFF library, the SF Gateway, which will make thousands of out-of-print titles by classic genre authors available as eBooks.

Building on the remarkable success of Gollancz’s Masterworks series, the SF Gateway will launch this Autumn with more than a thousand titles by close to a hundred authors. It will build to 3,000 titles by the end of 2012, and 5,000 or more by 2014. Gollancz’s Digital Publisher Darren Nash, who joined the company in September 2010 to spearhead the project said, “The Masterworks series has been extraordinarily successful in republishing one or two key titles by a wide range of authors, but most of those authors had long careers in which they wrote dozens of novels which had fallen out of print. It seemed to us that eBooks would offer the ideal way to make them available again. This realization was the starting point for the SF Gateway.” Wherever possible, the SF Gateway will offer the complete backlist of the authors included.

The SF Gateway will be closely integrated with the recently announced new online edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, which provides an independent and definitive reference source of information on the authors and books included. Direct links between the Encyclopedia and the Gateway will provide easy access to eBook editions, for sale through all major online retailers.

The Gateway site will also act as a major community hub and social network for SF readers across the world, allowing them to interact with each other and recommend titles and authors. The site is planned to include forums, blogs, regular promotions, and is envisaged to become the natural home on the net for anyone with an interest in classic SFF.

All of a sudden, I’m genuinely interested in buying an ebook reader. (Or at least a device with ebook-reading capabilities; I suspect the standalone ebook reader will be an exemplary illustration of Chairman Bruce’s concept of “obsolete before plateau”, killed off by convergence in the tablet market, folded in as one more function for your general purpose portable computing/connectivity platform.)

I’m quite impressed at how well Gollancz have kept this on the downlow for so long, too, especially given all the folk in the [aca]fandom circuit (myself included) carping loudly about publishers failing to embrace new platforms and technologies. The sheer joined-up-ness of this project (and the decision to base it all on pure HTML5, with no flash-in-the-pan walled-garden proprietary app crapola) is ambitious and forward-looking; I’m sure there’ll be some minor snags here and there, but I get the sense that this has been thought through very carefully, and that a certain allowance for tweaking and flex has been built in.

And to see that vast (and apparently set-to-grow) backlist of out-of-print titles brought back into availability is a thing of wonder. Ladies and gentlemen of Gollancz, and everyone else who has been involved: I salute you.