HAPPY NEW YEAR!

We'll be back after the weekend, in which time it will be 2012. And in February, we celebrate 3 years of the World SF Blog!

Outer Alliance Podcast interviews Zen Cho and Shveta Thakrar

The Outer Alliance Podcast interviews contributors to SteamPowered II: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories, which includes Zen Cho and Shveta Thakrar. You can listen to the interview here.

Interview with Paolo Chikiamco

While Lavie is currently away, I managed to interview Paolo Chikiamco, who recently published a steampunk comic (High Society) and an anthology on Filipino myth (Alternative Alamat) for the Kindle (disclosure: both were published by the company I work for). Hi! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. First off, what made you decide to...

Tuesday Fiction: “A Hundred Thousand Armstrongs” by Zoltán László

Today's Tuesday Fiction is by Zoltán László from Hungary.  Zoltán László’s first short story was published in 1999. Since then two dozen further short stories have been published in Hungarian SF&F magazines, periodicals and anthologies (for example Galaktika, Átjáró, Roham, Csillagszálló). He has also written four novels in various sub-genres like a mix of cyberpunk and...

Fireside Magazine interviews Ken Liu and Tobias Buckell

Fireside Magazine is running a Kickstarter drive right now and it's posted interviews with Ken Liu (who translated Ma Boyong's fiction earlier this month) and Tobias Buckell. Here's an excerpt: For Ken Liu: You also work as a translator, programmer, and lawyer. How do these things mesh, and how do they feed into your writing?...

Words Without Borders December 2011: The Fantastic

This month's Words Without Borders features stories with a fantastic theme. Here's an excerpt from the introduction: In this month's main feature we travel into the realm of the fantastic, where routine situations turn surreal and the otherworldly becomes the norm. The journey begins on a bus with its own itinerary in Natsuki Ikezawa's "Navidad...

Short Story Highlight: “The Gallows-Horse” by Reza Negarestani

The excellent Weird Fiction Review has posted The Gallows-Horse, a short story by Iranian author Reza Negarestani, from the anthology The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities: Museum: Museum of Intangible Arts and Objects, Saragossa, Spain Exhibitions: The Secret History of Objects; The Center for Catoptrics and Optical Illusions; Hall of the Man-Object Creators and Causes: Objects themselves; Deviant phenomenal...

Utopia by Ahmed Khaled Towfik Reviewed

Strange Horizons reviews Ahmed Khaled Towfik's Utopia: Utopia, the first novel by the prolific and popular Towfik to be translated into English, was published in Cairo in 2008. It was an instant bestseller, and has been reprinted four times. Set in 2023, it depicts a bleak Egypt divided into the pampered inhabitants of Utopia, and...

Short Story Highlight: “Enter The Dragon. Later, Enter Another” by Lavie Tidhar

Just wanted to draw your attention to a short story I published on my blog yesterday: Enter The Dragon. Later, Enter Another - which deals with a future increasingly dominated by the effects of multiple WikiLeaks... 1. Julian Assange’s Impenetrable Fortress of Ice lies on top of Mount Terror, on Ross Island in Antarctica. It...

Silvia Moreno-Garcia on Lovecraft: Racing and Literature

Silvia Moreno-Garcia comments on the topic raised last week by Nnedi Okorafor, discussing Lovecraftian fiction in general. Lovecrat was a racist. That should come as no surprise to anyone who has read about him. He was also a knot of contradictions (not only because he married a Jewish woman after railing against Jewish people), which...