Salon.com on Soviet Science Fiction

Salon.com has a feature on Russian SF novel Day of the Oprichnik, and Soviet SF in general: During its 70-year lifetime, the Soviet Union was the perfect Other for Westerners: a colossal enigma, alternately dystopian and utopian, onto which we could project all our fears, hopes and dreams; a funhouse mirror in which our own culture...

India’s first ComiCon

CNN reports on India's first Comic Con: India's first comic convention wouldn't have been born if Jatin Verma and his team of graphic geeks hadn't forgotten to get travel visas. “After we collected the money for the San Diego Comic Con, we realized we had no visas. So we decided to bring the comic con...

Racontons une histoire ensemble: History and Characteristics of French IF (Part 2)

Val Grimm, Editors' note: As part of our coverage of this year’s Second Annual Interactive Fiction Mini-Convention, we are publishing two articles from Interactive Fiction Theory Reader, a newly released collection of essays including work by Nick Montfort, Andrew Plotkin, Emily Short, and many more. This is the second article, the first being Francesco Cordella's...

Racontons une histoire ensemble: History and Characteristics of French IF (Part 1)

Val Grimm, Editors' note: As part of our coverage of this year’s Second Annual Interactive Fiction Mini-Convention, we are publishing two articles from Interactive Fiction Theory Reader, a newly released collection of essays including work by Nick Montfort, Andrew Plotkin, Emily Short, and many more. This is the second article, the first being Francesco Cordella's...

Short Story Highlight: “起狮，行礼 (Rising Lion—The Lion Bows)” by Zen Cho

Strange Horizons have recently published new story, 起狮，行礼 (Rising Lion—The Lion Bows), by Malaysian writer Zen Cho: The hotel was not like any hotel Jia Qi had seen before. There was no drive swooping around a fountain featuring little peeing babies, no glass doors opening onto a golden lobby lit by chandeliers, no men in white...

Note on Short Stories and Submissions

We've been running a short story a week for the past five months(!), including three originals in the past three weeks. We're running a little short on shorts, as it were, so we're going to take a month off and catch up on general world sf news. We have some more stories in the pipeline...

Translating Genre from Japan (Haikasoru Week addendum)

Haikasoru Week is over, but as an addendum, why not check out beatrice.com, who have just run an interview with two of Haikasoru's translators, Jim Hubbert and Cathy Hirano: To give just one example, the word miya, which is used in both books, means “palace” according to the Japanese-English dictionary. That seems simple enough—but what image does the...

Asimov’s Science Fiction, Vol. 35, #3, March 2011

In “Clean” by John Kessel, Elizabeth and Daniel decide, against their daughter Jinny’s insistence, that Daniel should experience mechanical memory erasure in one fell swoop to stave off the degeneration of Alzheimer’s. The process strips away Daniel’s affective memories of his wife and daughter, but leaves his intellect intact. Kessel uses plain and uninflected prose...

Ideomancer, Vol. 10 Issue 1

According to the editor’s note, The March issue of ideomancer is comprised of three stories full of “slanted spring sunlight; stories light enough to float; stories about beginnings”. On the surface, I would agree, but what I really think the link they all share is that they are chock full of bittersweet flights of fancy....

Haikasoru Week: And the winners are…

And we have winners! I’d like to thank everyone who entered the competition this week, and everyone who’s visited the blog to check out our Haikasoru Week. I'm very pleased with the turnout, and hope we can feature another publisher highlight soon. In the meantime, the next Author Week is just around the corner! As before,...