Got home today to find the first advance copy of both the Australian and the US editions of The Locus Awards, which was quite cool. They have different covers (both by the supremely talented Michael Whelan)and different internal designs, and look wonderful in their own way. I couldn’t be prouder of this book, and finally getting to see the finished product makes all of the work worthwhile. This is the good part! Many thanks to Stephanie Smith and her supremely talented co-workers at HarperSydney and to Diana Gill and her fantastic team at HarperNewYork. Now, go buy it!
Daily Archives: 8 June, 2004
108666600607296259
The first review for the Locus anthology…
I’m fairly sure it’s ok to do this. I just got a copy of the first review of The Locus Awards, a starred review from the American Library Association’s trade journal, Booklist. It’s not bad at all.
………………………………………..
Booklist, July 2004
**** The Locus Awards: 30 Years of the Best in SF and Fantasy
No surprise, this is an excellent collection, including many of the best sf stories of the last 30 years, culled from the winners of awards for short fiction bestowed by readers of Locus, the trade monthly of the sf and fantasy field. The selections are presented by decade, and the 1990s stories, from Terry Bisson’s hilarious, accurately titled “Bears Discover Fire” to Bruce Sterling’s futuristic trust network in “Maneki Neko”, hold their own with ’70s classics like “The Death of Doctor Island”, Gene Wolfe’s look at the future of psychotherapy, and ’80s evergreens including Ursula Le Guin’s “The Day before the Revolution”, about the founder of the revolutionary movement in her novel The Dispossessed (1974); John Varley’s “The Persistence of Vision”, on sight and its pitfalls; and Connie Willis’ “Even the Queen”, which proves that feminism can have a sense of humor. If the newest, post-2000 stories are too new to be classics, they verify the promise of growth in the field; see Ted Chiang’s “Hell Is the Absence of God”, for instance, and Neil Gaiman’s creepy-sweet, almost ghost story, “October in the Chair”.
YA/M: Some sex and violence, but these are some of the best stories in the field..