David Nickle's Blog, page 13

Alasdair Stuart is a Suave Dude...

I first learned of Alasdair as the genial Serling at the horror podcast Pseudopod, introducing some fine, terrifying horror stories, and also three of my own. He seemed like a very suave dude in podcast - and this spring, when we met up in Brighton at the World Horror Convention, it became clear his suaveness was not limited to the podcasting world. Alasdair is also an editor, of the British sf online 'zine The Hub, and a blogger, for SFX, the British sf / f / h newsmagazine, among many other...

Words in the Wilderness

This just in: I'm heading north in a couple of weeks, to talk horror, literature and blackflies in Sudbury, at the brand-spankin'-new Words in the Wilderness Literary Festival. It's being organized at least in part by Ken Lillie-Paetz, and it's a week-long festival to draw together writers and artists and readers from across Ontario.

I'm doing my bit on Sunday July 25, from 3-5 p.m. at the Rainbow Cinema in town. There'll be a reading and some talk, and some book-selling-and-signing going on.

The Polaris File...

It is that time again - the height of the summer, when our heat-poached brains turn to television and movies and bright, exciting stories presented in a variety of dimensions. Also Polaris - the media-favouring Toronto sf convention that is taking place weekend after this one, in Richmond Hill. For the past few years, they've been letting the writers in - writers including me - along with the stars.
Polaris is taking place July 16-18 at the Sheraton Parkway Toronto North Hotel - roughly at...

OOPS

I have no empirical evidence, but I'm going to guess that most regular Yard-apes are not regular perusers of No More Potlucks, the Montreal-based online culture journal. So I commend you to my story "OOPS," just now gone live in their Mea Culpa issue. Guest-editor Mariko Tamaki approached me to write a Mea Culpa story - and I wrote this one, which starts something like this:

   A little electric contraption inside played a song every time you opened it. Da, da da Da. Da, da da Da.


  He...

A Sunburst Award - Missed It By That Much...

Very flattering news from the Sunburst Awards jury, who announced the finalists for the 2010 Sunburst Award for Canadian speculative fiction. While it appears I will remain in the cheering section this year for my friends Karl Schroeder and Cory Doctorow - both of whose books made the short list - Monstrous Affections was one of four books to make the recommended reading/honorable mention list.

So congratulations to adult fiction nominees Karl and Cory, Charles De Lint, Robert Charles Wilson a...

Noting a Notable Shout-Out

Ellen Datlow, who edits - well, just about everything it sometimes seems - has posted a list of eight notable story collections from 2009. And she has listed Monstrous Affections, my own little bag of stories, as one of them.

Here's what she said, from her Best Horror of the Year round-up, and the post:

Monstrous Affections by David Nickle (Chizine Publications) is this Canadian's first collection, although the stories in it were originally published between 1994 and 2009. That story from...

A G20 moment...

There were so many G20 moments worthy of note here in Toronto over the weekend: the moments when black-clad droogs raised the world's consciousness about the dangers of fiscal restraint by setting police cars on fire, smashing store windows and lobbing mailboxes into roads; the moments where police boxed joggers, dog-walkers and Oh-Canada singing protesters into a downtown intersection for several hours during a torrential downpour; or when other police fired rubber bullets into a crowd of pe...

The Aurora Awards - Thirty Years of Canadian Science Fiction (and me)

Well this takes me back. In 1991 (or so) Karl Schroeder and I sat down at a Brother portable typerwriter in a farmhouse on the top of the Niagara Escarpment, and banged out the line, "The man in the moon's smile began to slip. It turned into a leer." Which was the first line of "The Toy Mill," our story about a Satanic Santa (or maybe a Santa-ic Satan?) who wishes to destroy the world with wishes, and is ultimately undone by a very focussed little girl. In 1992, it appeared in Tesseracts 4, L...

Evelyn Evelyn - or, Breaking Up is Hard To Do...

It's particularly hard to do if you're trying to split with your parapagus tripus dibrachius twin sister - sharing as you do "three legs, two arms, three lungs, two hearts and a single liver."  Good thing that twin rock stars Evelyn and Evelyn Neville (aka Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley) seemed to be getting along so famously in Toronto last night at the Great Hall on Queen Street. 

Which is to say, it is time for yard-apes to brace themselves for one of the Yard's semi-regular...

Eutopia in '11

It can at last be spoken aloud. In the spring of 2011, my novel Eutopia will appear under the ChiZine Publications imprint - the same imprint who did such a fine job with my story collection Monstrous Affections.

CZP announced the title and publication date on Twitter and Facebook just this afternoon. So I am, as ever, two steps behind the curve. But that, like the brevity of this post, should not indicate any lack of enthusiasm.

Quite the opposite, in fact.