Richard Bowes remarkable story “There’s A Hole in the City” has won the 2006 Million Writers Award for Fiction. The story, which is also nominated for the 2005 Nebula Award for Best Short Story, is terrific. I’m delighted it’s won the Million Writers Award, and very pleased that it’ll be in Fantasy: The Very Best of 2005.
Via: Matt Cheney
The Science Fiction Book Club have listed Best Short Novels: 2006, so you can now order it, and should see copies sometime in early June. I’m really happy with the book, and have had a great time working with Andrew Wheeler, Kathy Kiernan and the team at the Club this time out.
Of course, now that the listing is public I can confirm that the mystery ninth story is…ta da!… Jeffrey Ford’s wonderful short novel, The Cosmology of the Wider World. It’s a stunning story and one that I’m thrilled to be able to include in the anthology. I’d really like to thank Jeff, Pete Crowther at PS Publishing, and Nick Gevers for helping make sure it could happen. The story was originally published in a lovely edition from PS with a great Kim Veitch Kim Deitch cover, and this will be its first US publication. Be sure to check it out. And if you love it as much as I do, you’ll be interested to know that there should be a second Cosmology story coming out from PS sometime next year.
Note: Edited to correct my error. I credited the fine cover art for Jeff’s book from memory. It clearly is by Kim Deitch, who had was covered in Time Magazine several years back, and not some fictional person that I entirely invented. Apologies to Kim, who did a great job.
Having said that, I entirely understand the reviewer’s point of “Yes, we know you can do Heinlein — but can you do you?” One of the ironies here is that the book I wrote immediately after Old Man’s War — The Android’s Dream — is rather different tonally than Old Man’s War or Ghost Brigades; and at the very least it can’t be said to be Heinleinesque because Dear Ol’ Bob never opened a book with a chapter-long fart joke.
As I mentioned earlier, I spent some time catching up on John Scalzi. Read both Old Man’s War and The Ghost Brigades, and enjoyed them both. They’re good fun SF, and definitely show the influence of Heinlein that most reviewers have noted, and that John Scalzi acknowledges in the above quote from his blog. Well, a few days ago John emailed me the opening chapter of his next novel, The Android’s Dream, which as promised opens with a chapter long fart joke. It starts with “Dirk Moeller didn’t know if he could fart his way into a major diplomatic incident”, and then it gets really funny. I’m not going to say much more about the chapter because readers should get the chance to enjoy it themselves. I can’t really say much about the novel either, though based on one chapter I’ve seen it does move away from the whole Heinlein scenario. I do believe John’s comment that The Android’s Dream may well be “almost entirely message-free; if a science fiction novel could be described as a “popcorn book” … this would be that book.” It sounds like fun and I’m looking forward to seeing the entire book when it’s ready.
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Paul McAuley has a blog, and one of the first thing he’s posted is the happy news that he’s sold three new novels to Gollancz in the UK. The first novel on the contract, Cowboy Angels, is pretty much complete and will be published in the second half of 2007. Then there’s two Quiet War related novels. Given what Paul mentioned a while back on the TTAPRess message boards about wanting some old style pulp SF adventure, I’m really looking forward to these two.