Tuesday Fiction: “Ganesh, in the Afternoon” by Fábio Fernandes

This week's short story, by Brazilian author Fábio Fernandes.   Ganesh, in the Afternoon by Fábio Fernandes   “For starters, the first sentence in a short story must always be a startling one,” said Villupuram the Elephant God, waving the printed pages in one of his four hands. “Right, but what about the story? Did you like...

Short Story Club Discusses Singh; Rajaniemi

Over at Torque Control, they've just run their second Short Story Club, discussing, among others, stories by Vandana Singh - Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra (read the story online at Strange Horizons) - and Hannu Rajaniemi - Elegy for a Young Elk (read the story online at Subterranean Online). Check out the discussion on each!

The Key, 26 November, 2010

When I was at SFContario last weekend, I attended a panel on "Review and Criticism in the SF Field", which gave me a lot of good ideas to apply to The Portal . . . among them (as proposed by Patrick Nielsen Hayden) creating a weekly aggregation of interesting writing about genre fiction available on...

A Brief History of Mexican Science Fiction

Over at Strange Horizons, Silvia Moreno-Garcia offers A Brief History of Mexican Science Fiction: At the beginning of the 1980s, Mexican science fiction was facing a death spiral. Then, suddenly, something odd happened: a whole new generation of writers started producing original, unique tales that were not knockoffs of American or British writers. Mexican science...

Romanian SF&F Awards Announced

The Romanian Science Fiction&Fantasy Society (SRSFF)  Awards 2010 Friday, November the 19th 2010, at  the Gaudeamus International Book Fair (Bucharest, Romania), were awarded the SRSFF (Societatea Romana de Science Fiction si Fantasy) 2010 prizes. These awards are meant to highlight the efforts of those who, during the year promoted and contributed to the romanian science fiction...

Tuesday Fiction: “Eustace Albert” by Anil Menon

Sorry for the slight delay in posting - without further ado, here is this week's story, by Indian writer Anil Menon! Eustace Albert By Anil Menon The boy’s name was Eustace Albert. But that wasn’t the problem. His troubles were of his own making, and his mother summed it up neatly. “Eustace,” said Mrs. Albert,...

Review of French Canadian Magazine Solaris

Over at the SF Portal, René Walling reviews Solaris #175, "one of the oldest ongoing genre magazines", and the premier French-Canadian SF magazine: Like most issues of Solaris, this one offers many mixes: fantasy and SF, literary explorations and pulpy adventure, Canadian, French and American writers, yet somehow the editorial team manages to bring it all together...

Islam Sci Fi Interview of Steven Barnes

Islam and Science Fiction has an interview with Steven Barnes. Here's an excerpt: M. Aurangzeb: The Muslims in your stories are multi-faceted characters while in a lot of other literature they are presented as one-dimensional in character usually represented as the other, what role do you think fiction has in healing between people? Steven Barnes:...

Amal El-Mohtar on Fantasy, The Middle-East, and a Conversation with Saladin Ahmed

Over at Blackgate, Amal El-Mohtar talks about her Middle-East experience, and interviews Saladin Ahmed. Here's an excerpt from her essay and interview respectively: Over the last nine years, I’ve had occasion to be startled, and then to cease to be startled, by the extent to which my Middle-Eastern-ness gets conflated with Muslim-ness as a matter...

New/Old Japanese SF by Toshihiko Onoue

Over at the Haikasoru blog, Nick Mamatas reprints an essay by Toshihiko Onoue (written in 2002) on New/Old Japanese SF. Here's an excerpt: In contrast, Hayashi’s SF builds realistic worlds using straight-pitch ideas with matter-of-fact detail and minimal window dressing. At first glance his style may seem unpolished, but it is replete with naming games...