American Fandom goes to, err, War

Following our post on Heinlein and racism on Friday, maybe we should just do an American Week on the WSB? It seemed to have raised some interesting discussions across the Internet, as N.K. Jemisin writes. There's still a lot of debate going on right now post-Readercon and Genevieve Valentine's complaints of being sexually harassed there....

Top Ten Japanese SF Novels

Over at SFWA, Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington list, and comment on, the list of all-time best Japanese SF, as voted on by readers of Japan's SF Magazine in 2006. 1. Hyakuoku no hiru to senoku no yoru  (Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights) by Ryu Mitsuse (1967) An epic, cosmic adventure in the manner of...

Nick Mamatas on the Nebula Awards

The winners of the Nebula Awards have been announced - it was a diverse list of nominees that included Amal El-Mohtar, Ted Chiang and N.K. Jemisin, and Apex Book of World SF series contributors Aliette de Bodard, Shweta Narayan and Nnedi Okorafor. There have been various comments made about the eventual winners, most outspoken of...

Editorial: On Japanese SF, by Nick Mamatas (Haikasoru Week)

On Japanese SF By Nick Mamatas In Issui Ogawa’s The Next Continent, the “war on terror” is a political afterthought thanks to an American retreat from the Middle East; Japanese businesspeople see themselves as a counterweight to Western globalization; and engineers can do anything from building undersea vacation spots to constructing a wedding chapel on...

Haikasoru Week: Interview with Nick Mamatas

An Interview with Nick Mamatas by Charles Tan Hi Nick! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. This is Haikasoru's third year. What are your plans for 2011? We're pushing ahead with a lot of fun books. I'm very excited about Ten Billion Days And One Hundred Billion Nights by Ryu Mitsuse, for example—as far...

Haikasoru Week!

Following our first Author Week - featuring Ekaterina Sedia - which was both a success and a lot of fun (with more forthcoming), we've decided to do, in addition, a series of weeks focusing on genre publishers of international fiction, starting with the most exciting imprint to come around in a long time - Haikasoru,...

Apex Book Company Special Promotion

Apex Book Company, publishers of The Apex Book of World SF and the forthcoming Apex Book of World SF 2, are currently running a special offer wherein many of their books will be available signed, and all orders of paper books will come with a free e-book edition. While we are unable to provide signed...

Anti-Racist Anthology? On the problems of Editing

Nick Mamatas recently pointed out new UK anthology Never Again: Weird Fiction Against Racism and Fascism (edited by Allyson Bird and Joel Lane), which is, in Nick's terms, "an anti-fascist and anti-racist anthology, yet hasn't managed to include stories by any prominent writers of color." When he asked the editors about it he was told...

Haikasoru Week

For the rest of this week we're going to focus on books by Haikasoru, the English-language imprint of Japanese SF published by Viz and edited by Nick Mamatas. Charles Tan reviews Slum Online, Loups-Garous and The Next Continent. [note that these reviews first appeared on Charles' own blog, however we thought they were so good...

Nick Mamatas on The Anarchy of Translation

Over at the Haikasoru Blog, Nick Mamatas talks about translation: We get similar issues cropping up all the time with Haikasoru titles. If a character has a family name that translates into “Thermometer” for example—and no, it’s not a standard Japanese family name—do we call the character “Ms. Thermometer?” Even if the book is about...