I have just signed up to join the 190 other people who are planning on attending the 2017 World Fantasy Convention in San Antonio, Texas in November 2017. Now is a great time to buy a membership, given the price will rise tomorrow (from $150 to $225).

I think it’s also a great time to show support for the convention. There were some issues in the run up to the Columbus event, which seems to have gone off very well, but the convention did attempt to address them. I think there’s a good chance 2017 will be great, though that depends on everyone showing up!

With Karen Joy Fowler, Greg Manchess, David Mitchell, Gordon Van Gelder and Martha Wells lined up as guests, it certainly looks great. And with all sorts of cool people already signed up to attend, it should be a lot of fun.

Still, 190 out of a possible 950 attendees… There could be more. I know that number is low because Garth and Sean and I just bought memberships. Will we see you there? Aussies? I hope so!

With the year nearly over, how does 2017 look for me? It looks a little quieter, to be honest. Book-wise, I should have two new anthologies out. Infinity Wars, the sixth Infinity anthology, should be out from Solaris some time in June. It will follow The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 11, which should be out in May.

There should also be some novellas I’ve edited coming out from Tor.com. First up is Passing Strange by Ellen Klages (January), followed by Caitlin Kiernan’s Agents of Dreamland (February), Gwyneth Jones’s Proof of Concept (April), and something from Ian McDonald later in the year. I’ve also acquired several short stories from Yoon Ha Lee, Lavie Tidhar and others that will be coming out through the year.

I don’t currently have any plans to edit any single-author collections, though I am overdue on working on the Best of Lafferty. I’ll be working on Locus as always (my 20th year!), and maybe one or two other things if I can interest publishers.

As always, I’ll be co-hosting the Coode Street Podcast with Gary Wolfe. We should hit our 300th episode some time before the end of 2016, so we’ll be cruising on into our next hundred with assorted guests. We’re keen to do more short story episodes with Kij Johnson, and there’s always the Roundtable with Ian and James (which I’ve been holding up, but am very keep to get back to).

What else? Conventions. I plan to attend WorldCon 75 in Helsinki, Finland this August. It’s my main convention for 2017. I ate also purchased a membership to World Fantasy 2017 in San Antonio, and really hope to be there, though we’ll have to see what plans and finances permit. If the world is insanely generous I may also make it to Continuum 13, the 57th Australian National Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne this June. We’ll have to see though.

I think that’s it. It sounds like a lot, I guess, but I’m feeling like I need to get on with things and add another project or two to the mix. Hopefully I can come up with something interesting before 2016 is done.

I was very sorry to hear this morning that Sheri S. Tepper had passed away. She started writing later in life, or at least publishing later in life, as a number of fine writers have, and ended up being extremely prolific through the 1980s and into the 1990s.

I first encountered Tepper’s work through her early novels in the ‘True Game‘ trilogy of trilogies and the ‘Marianne’ series, all books that read like fantasy but mixed science fiction and fantasy in a way that now seems prophetic. She wrote horror and mystery just as effectively, but probably hit her peak with Grass, a Hugo nominee (it lost to Dan Simmons’ Hyperion) and first in the ‘Arbai’ trilogy. I think it’s a masterwork that far outstrips her later work from the 1990s and 2000s.

A number of her more than 30 novels remain in print, but sadly, despite being awarded the World Fantasy Life Achievement, I don’t think she ever achieved the level of recognition she deserved. I could speculate on why (her gender, her politics, her somewhat more frank and even heavy-handed approach in her later novels), but I can only hope that will change.  She was remarkable.

Obituary: Locus; Whatever