From the large number of stories that series editor John Joseph Adams screened for this year’s collection, he picked the 80 best pieces (forty science fiction and forty fantasy) to submit to editor Hugh Howey for a blind reading, so that the prestige of the venues or author bylines were not a factor. (The ones Adams designated as notable are shown in a table at the link). Howey then selected 20 for publication (ten science fiction, ten fantasy.)
The book will be released on October 22, 2024.
Here is the Table of Contents with the 20 stories they thought the best.
2024 TABLE OF CONTENTS
FANTASY
The Ankle-Snatcher by Grady Hendrix from Creature Feature (Amazon Original Stories)
Bari and the Resurrection Flower by Hana Lee from Fantasy Magazine
The Blade and Bloodwright by Sloane Leong from Lightspeed
Bruised-Eye Dusk by Jonathan Louis Duckworth from Beneath Ceaseless Skies
Disassembling Light by Kel Coleman from Beneath Ceaseless Skies
Eye & Tooth by Rebecca Roanhorse from Out There Screaming edited by Jordan Peele & John Joseph Adams
How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub by P. Djeli Clark from Uncanny
If Someone You Love Has Become a Vurdalak by Sam J. Miller from The Dark
John Hollowback and the Witch by Amal El-Mohtar from The Book of Witches edited by Jonathan Strahan
Resurrection Highway by A.R. Capetta from Sunday Morning Transport
SCIENCE FICTION
Calypso’s Guest by Andrew Sean Greer from Amazon Original Stories
Emotional Resonance by V.M. Ayala from Escape Pod
Falling Bodies by Rebecca Roanhorse from The Far Reaches edited by John Joseph Adams (Amazon Original Stories)
Form 8774-D by Alex Irvine from Reactor The Four Last Things by Christopher Rowe from Asimov’s
How It Unfolds by James S.A. Corey from The Far Reaches edited by John Joseph Adams (Amazon Original Stories)
The Long Game by Ann Leckie from The Far Reaches edited by John Joseph Adams (Amazon Original Stories)
Once Upon a Time at the Oakmont by P.A. Cornell from Fantasy Magazine
From the large number of stories that series editor John Joseph Adams screened for this year’s collection, he picked the 80 best pieces (forty science fiction and forty fantasy) to submit to editor R. F. Kuang for a blind reading, so that the prestige of the venues or author bylines were not a factor. (The ones Adams designated as notable are shown in a table at the link). Kuang then selected 20 for publication (ten science fiction, ten fantasy.)
The book will be released on October 17, 2023.
Here is the Table of Contents with the 20 stories they thought the best.
FANTASY
Readings in the Slantwise Sciences by Sofia Samatar from Conjunctions
Beginnings by Kristina Ten from Fantasy
The Six Deaths of the Saint by Alix E. Harrow from Into Shadow
Men, Women, and Chainsaws by Stephen Graham Jones from Tor.com
There Are No Monsters on Rancho Buenavista by Isabel Canas from Nightmare
White Water, Blue Ocean by Linda Raquel Nieves Pérez from Reclaim the Stars
Three Mothers Mountain by Nathan Ballingrud from Screams from the Dark
Pellargonia: A Letter to the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology by Theodora Goss from Lost Worlds & Mythological Kingdoms
In The Beginning of Me I Was A Bird by Maria Dong from Lightspeed
Folk Hero Motifs in Tales Told by the Dead by KT Bryski from Strange Horizons
SCIENCE FICTION
Air to Shape Lungs by Shingai Njeri Kagunda from Africa Risen
Sparrows by Susan Palwick from Asimov’s
Termination Stories for the Cyberpunk Dystopia Protagonist by Isabel J. Kim from Clarkesworld
Rabbit Test by Samantha Mills from Uncanny
Murder by Pixel by S.L. Huang from Clarkesworld
The CRISPR Cookbook: A Guide to Biohacking Your Own Abortion in a Post-Roe World by MKRNYILGLD from Lightspeed
The Odyssey Problem by Chris Willrich from Clarkesworld
Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867 by Kim Fu from Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century
The Difference Between Love and Time by Catherynne M. Valente from Someone in Time
Cumulative Ethical Guidelines by Malka Older from Bridge to Elsewhere
From the large number of stories that series editor John Joseph Adams screened for this year’s collection, he picked the 80 best pieces to submit to editor Rebecca Roanhorse for a blind reading, so that the prestige of the venues or author bylines were not a factor. (The ones Adams designated as notable are shown in a table at the link). Roanhorse then selected 20 for publication (ten science fiction, ten fantasy.)
The book will be published on November 1.
Here is the Table of Contents with the 20 stories they thought the best.
FANTASY
The Captain and the Quartermaster by C.L. Clark from Beneath Ceaseless Skies
Colors of the Immortal Palette by Caroline M. Yoachim from Uncanny
L’Esprit de L’Escalier by Catherynne M. Valente from Tor.com
The Red Mother by Elizabeth Bear from Tor.com
The Cloud Lake Unicorn by Karen Russell from Conjunctions
Skindler’s Veil by Kelly Link from When Things Get Dark
The Frankly Impossible Weight of Han by Maria Dong from khōréō
If the Martians Have Magic by P. Djèlí Clark from Uncanny
I Was a Teenage Space Jockey by Stephen Graham Jones from Lightspeed
10 Steps to a Whole New You by Tonya Liburd from Fantasy
SCIENCE FICTION
The Cold Calculations by Aimee Ogden from Clarkesworld
Root Rot by Fargo Tbakhi from Apex
Proof of Induction by José Pablo Iriarte from Uncanny
The Algorithm Will See You Now by Justin C. Key from Vital: The Future of Healthcare
Delete Your First Memory For Free by Kel Coleman from FIYAH
The Pizza Boy by Meg Elison from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
Broad Dutty Water: A Sunken Story by Nalo Hopkinson from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
The Future Library by Peng Shepherd from Tor.com
Tripping Through Time by Rich Larson from Dark Matter
Let All the Children Boogie by Sam J. Miller from Tor.com
— J. Michael Straczynski (@straczynski) May 7, 2022
(3) COMPLAINT: JUSTIFIED OR UNJUSTIFIED? [Item by Anne Marble.] This review of the new alternative history novel The Peacekeeper: A Novel by B.L. Blanchard might make an interesting discussion. There’s also a three-star review showing the same confusion. (This is one of the First Reads book for this month on Amazon, so the potential reviewers probably come outside of SFF, but still… Why can’t people just Google?)
(4) VIDEO GAME NEWS. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the Financial Times behind a paywall, Tom Faber reviews Norco, a point-and-click adventure game with magical realist elements based on the personal experiences of lead developer Yuts, who grew up in Norco, Louisiana near “a Shell oil refinery that exploded during his childhood in 1988, damaging his house.”
Norco‘s writing nods to Southern Gothic authors such as William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy alongside genre writers Raymond Chandler and William Gibson. Looking at a vehicle in your garden, you are told: “This truck was your grandfather’s. You remember hiding in his lap while he let you steer. The dead wasps that collected behind the seat. The smell of grease, whiskey and nicotine.’ This terse, stylish language is studded with sharply observed local vernacular and occasional bouts of impressionistic poetry whose adventurous metaphors only rarely stray into purple prose….
..If it all sounds sombre, the game leavens its storytelling with plenty of wackiness and wry humour. There is a detective who wears clown make-up as a fashion choice. A cat on a bookshop counter will, if stroked repeatedly, purr so ecstatically that it flies through the air, crashing through the ceiling.
(5) LIFEWRITING. [Item by Todd Mason.] Tananarive Due and Steve Barnes’s latest podcast features guest Patton Oswalt. All three are horror genre folks, among other things, including being screenwriters, and Harlan Ellison friends or acquaintances. “Lifewriting: Write for Your Life! Special Guest: Patton Oswalt!”
In this episode, Steve and Tananarive talk to comedian and actor Patton Oswalt about how horror helps us navigate difficult times, the horror-comedy connection, the late Harlan Ellison, and meditation as a tool for coping with stress.
(6) GEORGE PERÉZ (1954-2022) George Pérez, the acclaimed comic book artist and writer known for his work on major DC properties, including Crisis on Infinite Earths and Wonder Woman, along with Marvel’s The Avengers, has died. The Hollywood Reporternoted his passing with a long tribute. He was 67.
Constance here, with the update no one wants to read. George passed away yesterday, peacefully at home with his wife of 490 months and family by his side. He was not in pain and knew he was very, very loved.
We are all very much grieving but, at the same time, we are so incredibly grateful for the joy he brought to our lives. To know George was to love him; and he loved back. Fiercely and with his whole heart. The world is a lot less vibrant today without him in it.
He loved all of you. He loved hearing your posts and seeing the drawings you sent and the tributes you made. He was deeply proud to have brought so much joy to so many.
Everyone knows George’s legacy as a creator. His art, characters and stories will be revered for years to come. But, as towering as that legacy is, it pales in comparison to the legacy of the man George was. George’s true legacy is his kindness. It’s the love he had for bringing others joy – and I hope you all carry that with you always.
Today is Free Comic Book Day. A day George absolutely loved and a fitting day to remember his contributions to comics and to our lives. I hope you’ll enjoy your day today with him in mind. He would have loved that.
Please keep his wife Carol in your thoughts and again, I thank you for respecting her privacy. I remain available through the contact on the page.
George’s memorial service will take place at MEGACON Orlando at 6pm on Sunday, May 22nd. It will be open to all. Details to follow.
We will miss him always.
(7) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
1997 – [By Cat Eldridge.] Twenty-five years ago, The Fifth Element got its first theatrical exhibition at the Cannes Film Festival, an English-language French film directed by Luc Besson and co-written by Besson and Robert Mark Kamen from a story by Besson.
Artists Jean “Moebius” Giraud and Jean-Claude Mézières, whose books Besson acknowledges are his inspiration for a great deal of the film, were hired for production design. The fabulous if admittedly over-the-top costume design was by Jean-Paul Gaultier who is not in the film. (I checked.) The filming took place in London and Mauritania when nothing in France was available.
It is very much an adolescent fantasy, or fiction if you prefer, as he wrote it at sixteen though he was thirty-eight when it was actually produced. I love the cast which includes among many Bruce Willis, John Neville, Milla Jovovich, Gary Oldman, Ian Holm and, in a role for the ages, Maïwenn Le Besco. Look I love this film — the casting is great, the story works and I love the universe here. I’ve watched it least a half dozen times so far.
The budget was close to ninety million but it made back over two hundred and sixty million. Quite impressive indeed.
So what did the critics think at the time? Let’s as usual start with Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Tribune: “’The Fifth Element,’’ which opened the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday, is one of the great goofy movies–a film so preposterous I wasn’t surprised to discover it was written by a teenage boy. That boy grew up to become Luc Besson, director of good smaller movies and bizarre big ones, and here he’s spent $90 million to create sights so remarkable they really ought to be seen.”
And let us finish with Marc Salov of the Austin Chronicle who obviously didn’t know how old Besson was he wrote the script: “The Fifth Element never takes itself too seriously. Oldman is hilarious as the effete, over-the-top Zorg; Willis plays essentially the same character he’s played in his last five films — ever the scruffy rebel; and Jovavich is gorgeous, charming, and thoroughly believable as Leeloo (thanks to some terrific post-English language skills). Even U.K. trip-hop sensation Tricky scores points as Zorg’s right-hand toadie. Although the film tends to suffer from a severe case of overt preachiness in the third reel (shades of James Cameron’s The Abyss), it’s still a wonderfully visual, exciting ride. Besson remains one of France’s great national treasures, and The Fifth Element is a surprising, delightful melange of old-school dare-deviltry and new-age sci-fi.”
It has a very impressive eighty-six percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. It was nominated for a Hugo at BucConeer, the year Contact won. It is streaming on Amazon Prime and Paramount +.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born May 7, 1922 — Darren McGavin. Oh, I loved him being Carl Kolchak on the original Kolchak: The Night Stalker — How many times have I seen it? I’ve lost count. Yes, it was corny, yes, the monsters were low-rent, but it was damn fun. And no, I did not watch a minute of the reboot. By the way, I’m reasonably sure that his first genre role was in the Tales of Tomorrow series as Bruce Calvin in “The Duplicates“ episode which you can watch here. (Died 2006.)
Born May 7, 1923 — Anne Baxter. The Batman series had a way of attracting the most interesting performers and she was no exception as she ended playing two roles there, first Zelda, then she had the extended recurring role of Olga, Queen of the Cossacks. Other genre roles were limited I think to an appearance as Irene Adler in the Peter Cushing Sherlock Holmes film The Masks of Death. (Died 1985.)
Born May 7, 1931 — Gene Wolfe. He’s best known for his Book of the New Sun series. My list of recommended novels would include Pirate Freedom, The Sorcerer’s House and the Book of the New Sun series. He’s won the BFA, Nebula, Skylark, BSFA and World Fantasy Awards but to my surprise has never won a Hugo though he has been nominated quite a few times. He has been honored as a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. (Died 2019.)
Born May 7, 1940 — Angela Carter. Another one taken far too young by the damn Reaper. She’s best remembered for The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories where she took fairy tales and made them very, very adult in tone. Personally I’d recommend The Curious Room insteadas it contains her original screenplays for the BSFA-winning The Company of Wolves which starred Angela Lansbury, and The Magic Toyshop films, both of which were based on her own original stories. Though not even genre adjacent, her Wise Children is a brilliant and quite unsettling look at the theatre world. I’ve done several essays on her so far and no doubt will do more. (Died 1992.)
Born May 7, 1951 — Gary Westfahl, 71. SF reviewer for the LA Times, the unfortunately defunct as I enjoyed it quite a bit Internet Review of Science Fiction, and Locus Online. Editor of The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders; author of Immortal Engines: Life Extension and Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy (with George Slusser) and A Sense-of-Wonderful Century: Explorations of Science Fiction and Fantasy Films.
Born May 7, 1952 — John Fleck, 70. One of those performers the Trek casting staff really like as he’s appeared in Next Generation, Deep Space Nine in three different roles, Voyager and finally on Enterprise in the recurring role of Silik. And like so many Trek alumni, he shows up on TheOrville.
Born May 7, 1969 — Annalee Newitz, 53. They are the winner of a Hugo Award for Best Fancast at Dublin 2019 with Charlie Jane Anders for “Our Opinions Are Correct”. And their novel Autonomous was a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Novel, John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Locus Award for Best First Novel, while winning a Lambda Literary Award. Very impressive indeed. They are also the winner of the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for their best short science fiction, “When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis”. They are nominated again this year at Chicon 8 for a Best Fancast Hugo for their “Our Opinions Are Correct” podcast.
(9) STRANGE HAPPENINGS. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the Washington Post, David Betancourt interviews Benedict Cumberbatch and Elisabeth Olsen about Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, with Cumberbatch explaining that he thinks Stephen Strange is part of an ensemble and not necessarily the star. “Benedict Cumberbatch on Doctor Strange sequel: ‘It’s not all about him’”.
… Cumberbatch still gets opportunities to flex his own superhero muscles in the new film by playing multiple alternate universe versions of Doctor Strange. These include heroic, seemingly evil and zombielike versions of the superhero, who was created by the late Steve Ditko and Stan Lee and first appeared in Marvel Comics “Strange Tales” No. 110 back in 1963. Cumberbatch first dabbled with a Doctor Strange from a different world when he voiced the character in the animated series “What If…?” last year.
Ego seems to be the common denominator among the variants — he never works well with others. But Cumberbatch says Strange has to learn to rely on someone other than himself.
“These parallel existences have a similarity about them but there’s also key differences,” Cumberbatch said. “It was a challenge … to create something that’s different but at the same time recognizably Strange. There’s an element of him that’s constant. But he’s still really injured by his ego and his arrogance and his belief that he has to be the one holding the knife. This film really undoes that logic and stress-tests him in a way that means his evolution is such that he can’t operate as a solo entity. He has to collaborate.”…
(10) THESE BOOTS ARE MADE FOR HAWKING. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] The Starfleet boots seen on the new series will be made available to the public and will retail for about $500 Cdn. “Vancouver designer’s boots on deck as official shoes of the Enterprise in new Star Trek series” reports CBC News. And there’s no stitching in them because in space no one can see a sewing machine!
Vancouver’s John Fluevog is joining the USS Enterprise this spring as Starfleet’s official bootmaker.
Fluevog, whose shoes have been worn by the likes of Madonna, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and even B.C.’s Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry, designed footwear for the cast of the new series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which premieres May 5.
He said he feels a sense of connection to Star Trek in that both his shoes and the series offer a sense of escapism….
(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Boston Dynamics’s Spot is a hard-working robot but he still likes showing off his latest dance moves! “No Time to Dance”.
[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Rob Thornton, Lisa Garrity, Anne Marble, Todd Mason, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Thomas the Red.]
