Patrick O’Leary, who wrote a wonderful novel called The Gift, has a fine new fantasy short story, “The Witch’s Hand” online at Infinite Matrix.

I’m always interested in what gets overlooked. Hidden in a corner of the February 2005 issue of Locus, in the recommended reading section, is Locus‘s list of the “Best of the Best” short stories of 2004. This list was arrived at by the simplest of methods. Each of the stories listed received a minimum of five votes from our group of recommenders. It’s not a flawless system, but all of the stories recommended are worthy, and if we all might have changed the list (some of my favorite stories of the year are here, some are missing), it’s still interesting. Stories are listed alphabetically, by author.

“Leviathan Wept”, Daniel Abrahams
“The Garden”, Eleanor Arnason
“Quarry”, Peter S. Beagle
“The Fear Gun”, Judith Berman
“A Night in the Tropics”, Jeffrey Ford
“Men Are Trouble”, James Patrick Kelly
“Under the Flag of Night”, Ian McDowell
“Pat Moore”, Tim Powers
“Cold Fires”, M. Rickert
“The Voluntary State”, Christopher Rowe
“The Word That Sings the Scythe”, Michael Swanwick
“The Lost Pilgrim”, Gene Wolfe

Ellen Datlow has published several Australian writers on SciFiction, most notably Terry Dowling. This week she has two stories by Australians, “Matricide” by Lucy Sussex and a reprint of A. Bertram Chandler’s “Familiar Pattern“. Check them out.

According to the bio that accompanies Lucy’s story, a new collection, Sancta, is due out later this year, which is terrific news. Her first collection, My Lady Tongue was wonderful, and a second one is long, long overdue.

The good folk at this year’s Australian National Science Fiction Convention have been in touch to let me know that nominations are now open for the 2005 Ditmar Awards. All the relevant information can be found on their website. Nominations can be made by email and close on 1 March 2005.

I’ve had a quick look around on the net and I haven’t found a good list of Australian stuff published during 2004, but I do know there was a lot of it. Novels, collections, and anthologies by Australians were published in Australia, the US, the UK, and Europe. Stories published by Australians were published in just about every venue you could imagine, from high profile magazines, website and anthologies overseas, to small chapbooks locally. Search them out, and nominate! The quality of the ballot, and the result, is determined by the quality of participation. If you read, nominate and vote the awards will be better.

And with that in mind, I direct your attention to the “Best Professional Achievement” and “William Atheling Jr Award for Criticism or Review” categories, which seem to roughly correspond to the editing work I’ve done on The Locus Awards (HarperCollins), Science Fiction: Best of 2003 (Simon & Schuster/ibooks), and Best Short Novels: 2004 (SF Book Club/Doubleday Direct), and the reviewing etc work I’ve done Locus. I hesitate to say if they’re worthy of nomination, but your consideration is appreciated.

Mark Kelly, posting about the recently released Locus Poll and Reading List, wrote:

The online Locus Poll ballot is up … Special this year is a category for ‘best all-time fantasy story’ … Jonathan Strahan was the inspiration behind this category, and I’ll leave it to him to comment more about it in his blog.

Um, okay. I hadn’t really planned on saying much about it, but I always try to be responsive to suggestions. As a lot of you know, I spent some time last year working on The Locus Awards anthology. It was a lot of fun, and took into account not only results of the Awards but of various polls we’d done. I noticed, in looking at past polls, that we’d never specifically asked about fantasy short stories and though it would be interesting to see what readers thought were really excellent and important stories. I’m not sure what’s been written up in the magazine, but I had in mind stories published between 1900 and the present day. Hopefully the poll will give an interesting overview of what the magazine’s readers think are the best, the most important, the most enjoyable fantasy stories of the modern era.