I have been acquiring original fiction for Tor.com for a while now, both for the website and for their novella program.  The latest, and one of my favourites, is a new science fiction novelette by Greg Egan.

This is the blurb for “Uncanny Valley”:

Immortality, but at what price, in what form, and how could you be you? In the near future it’s possible to build a new you, a better you, one that could carry on forever.  But if you could carry on, if you could make choices about who you would be forever, how much of your past would you bring with you? Would you be tempted to maybe…edit? Adam isn’t all that he used to be, but he wants to be.

It’s classic Egan, powerful and challenging. The terrific artwork is by Mark Smith (another inspired choice by Irene Gallo), and the story will be out to read and own in August of this year.

I find myself less and less happy with social media, so I’m going to try (again) to blog here with some reliability. I may even try to get the blog to push posts over to social media and let it rest at that for the moment. Or I won’t.

Slow start to Saturday. Last night was the eldest daughter’s Prom. She was lovely and I was very proud of her: she seemed to have a good time. While she was at the Prom I got news that it looks like I’ve sold a new book, which is nice. I also started to watch a new Netflix documentary series, Five Came Back, which seems terrific.

What else? Coffee, toast and confusion this morning.

Well, the time has come. I have just recently delivered the manuscript for my latest anthology, Infinity Wars. It’s the sixth book in the ‘Infinity Project’ and while I’m waiting on copyedits for this one I’m already pushing ahead on the seventh.

Infinity Wars will be out in the world in September of this year, so you’ll be hearing plenty about it from me in the coming months. For the moment, here’s the table of contents:

• Introduction, Jonathan Strahan
• Evening of the Span of Their Days, Carrie Vaughn
• The Last Broadcasts, An Owomoyela
• Faceless Soldiers, Patchwork Ship, Caroline M Yoachim
• Dear Sarah, Nancy Kress
• The Moon is Not a Battlefield, Indrapramit Das
• Perfect Gun, Elizabeth Bear
• Oracle, Dominica Phettaplace
• In Everlasting Wisdom, Aliette deBodard
• Command and Control, David D. Levine
• Conversations with an Armory, Garth Nix
• Overburden, Genevieve Valentine
• Heavies, Rich Larson
• Weather Girl, E.J. Swift
• Mines, Eleanor Arnason
• ZeroS, Peter Watts

And here’s the cover text:

We have always fought. Tales of soldiers and war go back to the very roots of our history, to the beginnings of the places we call home. And science and technology have always been inextricably linked with the deadly art of war, whether through Da Vinci’s infamous machineries of war or the Manhattan Project’s world-ending bombs or distant starships fighting unknowable opponents.

Oppenheimer once wrote that “the atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.” But unendurable or not, future always comes. War was integral to science faction at its birth and remains so today, whether on the page or on the screen.

Infinity Wars asks one question: what would Oppenheimer’s different country be like? Who would fight it? Because at the end of it all, it always come down to a soldier alone, risking life and limb to achieve a goal that may never really make sense at all. How would those soldiers feel? What would they experience?

Infinity Wars tells the tale of soldiers, on the ground and fighting, in the near future and in the farthest reaches of space, using the latest technologies and facing the oldest of fears. New original military science fiction from Eleanor Arnason, Elizabeth Bear, Indrapramit Das, Aliette de Bodard, Nancy Kress, Rich Larson, David Levine, Garth Nix, An Owomoyela, Dominica Phettaplace, E.J. Swift, Genevieve Valentine, Carrie Vaughn, Peter Watts, and Caroline M. Yoachim that will leave you on the edge of your seat.

My sincere thanks to all of the fabulous authors who have written such great stories and agreed to be part of the whole Infinity madness.

Pre-order

You can pre-order Infinity Wars here.

It’s awards season and the judges of the 2017 Philip K. Dick Award and the Philadelphia SF Society, along with the Philip K. Dick Trust, have released the first major ballot of the year. The nominated works for the 2017 Philip K. Dick Award for ‘distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States during the previous calendar year’ are:

• Consider, Kristy Acevedo (Jolly Fish Press)
• Hwarhath Stories: Transgressive Tales by Aliens, Eleanor Arnason (Aqueduct Press)
• The Mercy Journals, Claudia Casper (Arsenal Pulp Press)
• Graft, Matt Hill (Angry Robot)
• Unpronounceable, Susan diRende (Aqueduct Press)
• Super Extra Grande, Yoss (trans. David Frye) (Restless Books)

First prize and any special citations will be announced on Friday, April 14, 2017 at Norwescon 40 at the DoubleTree by Hilton Seattle Airport, SeaTac, Washington.