Ask and you shall receive! My publisher at Night Shade let me know this morning that you can now pre-order The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year from amazon.com. The cover that you can see there is a placeholder, though the art by Stephan Martiniere is one of two fantastic pieces that will feature on the final cover. I think Night Shade’s designer Claudia Noble is one of the company’s best kept secrets – she’s responsible for the spectacular covers Night Shade have been doing of late – and I can’t wait to see what she’ll come up with. I’ve no doubt it will be fantastic.

In the meantime, I just got approached to do an interview about year’s bests by Jeff VanderMeer for his upcoming SF Site column, ‘Adventures in the Ink Trade’. Jeff just announced the column over at VanderWorld, and says this about it: “The second column will be about SF/F/H for SF Site and it is tentatively entitled Adventures in the Ink Trade. It will have a video component most of the time, in addition to traditional print interviews with people like Jonathan Strahan, mini book reviews, and commentary on “issues of the day” as they say. It will debut November 1.” I’m actually pretty stoked about doing the interview. Jeff sent me the questions yesterday, and they’re smart, relevant, and are the kind of questions that help you work out what you think about something. I’ve found over the past few years that, when I do something like this, I end up needing to externalise something that I know but haven’t necessarily had to articulate. So, it’s the first thing up for me to do, just as soon as I’ve finished the intro for The New Space Opera this weekend. I’m actually looking forward to it.