Neil Clarke's Blog, page 12

2019 Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award

Saturday night I received SFWA’s Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award for distinguished contributions to the science fiction and fantasy community. I’m much too tired to go into details at the moment, but I had a wonderful time at the conference and definitely won’t be forgetting that night anytime soon.

Lisa took a few pictures when I got home:

The award is made by Mike Libby.

2019 Nebula Conference

Tomorrow morning I’m boarding a flight for LA and going to the SFWA Nebula Conference. I’ll be on the following panels on Friday:

10:00-11:00 – Short Fiction Contract
3:30-4:30 – Navigating as “Gatekeepers” of Publishing

and participating in the mass signing event from 1:30-3:30 on Saturday.

I’m also going to be receiving a Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award for “for distinguished contributions to the science fiction and fantasy community” at the Nebula Awards ceremony on Saturday night. I’m still trying to wrap my head around that one. It’s quite an honor and a bit overwhelming. I’d also like to congratulate Nisi Shawl, who will also be receiving a Solstice Award this year. Sadly, she’ll be unable to attend.

2019 Locus Award Finalists

The 2019 Locus Award finalists have been announced!  “Umbernight“ by Carolyn Ives Gilman (best novella), Clarkesworld (best magazine), and I (best editor) are all on the list and keeping some very nice company. Congratulations to all the finalists!

 

 

 

Norwescon 42

I’m off to my first Norwescon (SeaTac, WA) next week! Very flattered to be one of the Guests of Honor (as Honored Professional) this year alongside Mary Robinette Kowal (Writer), Tran Nguyen (Artist), Dan Koboldt (Science), Nancy Pearl (Special), and Subterranean Press (Spotlight Publisher). I’m flying in on Wednesday and taking the red-eye home on Sunday night. At present, my schedule is as follows:

Thursday

Guest of Honor Banquet – 5:00PM – 6:30PM
Opening Ceremonies – 7:00pm – 8:00pm @ Grand 3
Norwescon Writers Workshop Meet & Greet – 8:00pm – 9:00pm

Sienna Saint-Cyr, Barth Anderson, Carol Berg, Nisi Shawl, Neil Clarke, Craig Laurance Gidney

Friday

Norwescon Writers Workshop Critique Session – 10:00am – 2:00pm
Welcome to Slush – 4:00pm – 5:00pm @ Cascade 9

Jaime O. Mayer, Coral Moore, Cory Skerry, Neil Clarke, Yilin Wang
Lifetime Members’ Dinner – 5:00pm – 7:00pm

Saturday

Autograph Session 1 – 10:00am – 11:00am @ Grand 2
Autograph Session 2 – 11:00am – 12:00pm @ Grand 2
Interview and Q&A with Neil Clarke – 12:00pm – 1:00pm @ Evergreen 3 & 4

Neil Clarke, Sienna Saint-Cyr, Barth Anderson
The New Norwescon Writers Workshop Q&A – 2:00pm – 3:00pm @ Cascade 11

Sienna Saint-Cyr, Barth Anderson, Carol Berg, Craig Laurance Gidney, Nisi Shawl, Neil Clarke
Start a Small Press, E-zine, or Web Comic – 3:00pm – 4:00pm @ Cascade 10

Lee Douglass (M), Patrick Swenson, Neil Clarke, Yanni Kuznia
Norwescon Writers Workshop Reception – 5:00pm – 6:00pm

Sienna Saint-Cyr, Carol Berg, Barth Anderson, Craig Laurance Gidney, Nisi Shawl, Neil Clarke

Sunday

Genres Without Borders – 10:00am – 11:00am @ Cascade 12

Neil Clarke (M), Gordon Van Gelder, Yilin Wang
Writing for Anthologies – 12:00pm – 1:00pm @ Cascade 12

K.G. Anderson (M), Marta Murvosh, Neil Clarke, Yanni Kuznia
Closing Ceremonies – 4:00pm – 5:00pm @ Evergreen 3 & 4

The 100,000

Sometime in March, the Clarkesworld Magazine submission system received its 100,000th story since being installed in September 2008. Since then, we’ve been open for submissions every month, except two. Back when I started developing this software, we were receiving about 300 submissions/month via email. (If I had to guess, somewhere between 4000 and 5000 of the earliest submissions to Clarkesworld are all that is missing from the database.) Since then, the monthly volume has increased to nearly four times that. (We were occasionally hitting 1200/month before we stopped accepting horror story submissions.)

It’s not the best way to count authors, but the system has submissions from just over 44,000 distinct email addresses and of those, 28,000 have only ever submitted one story. Three email addresses have broken 100 and a handful are approaching that milestone.

That’s a lot of people who have sent us their short fiction. Thank you and I look forward to reading the next 100,000! (Assuming they don’t all fall into the queue today.)

2019 Finalist for Hugo Award for Best Editor (Short Form)

The 2019 Hugo Award finalists were announced today and I am very honored to be among the finalists for Best Editor (Short Form). I’d like to thank everyone that voted for me.

This year’s Worldcon is in Ireland and my family has been looking forward to it for some time now. We (my parents are from Navan and will be joining us, along with Lisa, the boys, my sister, and her family) are taking the week before the convention to visit family and do a little sightseeing. Lisa and the boys have never been to Ireland or a Hugo ceremony.

It’s my seventh time as a finalist in this category and I am currently winless. I don’t know if the luck of the Irish or lucky number seven will come into play, but either way, I expect to have a great time.

The Best Science Fiction of the Year 2019 – Submission Guidelines

The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 5 will be published in mid-2020 and select from science fiction stories (short stories, novelettes, and novellas) originally published in English in 2019.

Translations are allowed as long as their first English language appearance is in 2019. To keep things simple, I will be using the publisher’s copyright, magazine’s cover date, or posting date (primarily for online fiction) to determine eligibility. Serialized works will be considered published at the time of the final installment.

Deadlines

Print materials must be received by November 1st. Digital materials must be received by November 15th. If your project is scheduled for publication after that date, please send galleys by the above deadlines so that I will have sufficient time to consider your work.

Rights

I will require non-exclusive World anthology rights in English in print, ebook, and audio formats for stories I select for this volume.

Delivery

I will accept science fiction stories, novelettes, and novellas for consideration in the following formats:

Print – mail to:

Neil Clarke

PO Box 172

Stirling, NJ 07980 

EPUB, MOBI, and .DOC – email to:

bestsciencefiction@clarkesworldmagazine.com

I strongly dislike reading PDFs, so please do not send me work in this format unless you have no other options.

Publishers: If sending a magazine/anthology/collection that also contains other fantasy/horror/other stories, please list the titles of the science fiction stories in your cover letter or email.

Authors: I will not be able to let you know whether or not your work has been submitted by your publisher. To avoid duplication, please check with your publisher before sending a story. If your work is self-published, please include the date and location (blog, website, Amazon, etc.) your work was originally published.

Stories published in the following magazines and anthologies do not need to be submitted. I already have (or will receive) them. UPDATED 2/18/2019

Magazines: Analog, Apex, Asimov’s, Better Worlds (The Verge), Clarkesworld, Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, Diabolical Plots, Escape Pod, F&SF,  Fiction River, Future Tense Fiction (Slate), Galaxy’s Edge, GigaNotoSaurus,  Interzone, Lightspeed, Samovar, Shoreline of Infinity, Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Uncanny, and Wired.

Anthologies: Readymade Bodhisattva, The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction, A People’s Future of the United States

Sending a book/file/story is a one-way transaction. I will not be confirming receipt or returning materials.

Notes on publication dates:

Magazines: It is traditional for magazine cover date to be used to determine year of publication, however, if a story from a January issue is published on the website of that publication in December of the prior year, that will be considered the first publication date. This is considered an intentional publication by the publisher in the earlier year.
Anthologies: If the ebook or an e-Arc of an anthology is made available for purchase (and delivery, preorders don’t count) in the year prior to the official copyright year, the earlier year will be ignored when determining eligibility.  If the print edition happens to ship a few days earlier than the official publication date, causing it to drift into the prior year, the copyright date will be used. Unlike the digital publication dates, this is something that tends to be outside the publisher’s control. This is why they are treated differently.

Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 4 Cover and Table of Contents

The Best Science Fiction of the Year – Volume 4

Night Shade Books – July 2, 2019

ISBN-10: 1949102084 (hardcover), 1597809888 (trade paperback)

ISBN-13: 978-1949102086 (hardcover), 978-1597809887 (trade paperback)

The fourth volume in a new year’s best series. This book will feature science fiction short stories/novelettes/novellas originally published in 2018.

Available for preorder at:

Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.es, Amazon.fr, Amazon.jp, Amazon.cn, Amazon.com.mx, Amazon.com.br (ebook, trade paperback, hardcover)
Barnes & Noble
Books-a-Million (ebook, tradepaperback, hardcover)
Booktopia (trade paperback)
Indiebound (trade paperback)
Kobo (ebook)
Powells (trade paperback, hardcover)

Table of Contents

“When We Were Starless” by Simone Heller (Clarkesworld Magazine, October 2018)
“Intervention” by Kelly Robson (Infinity’s End, edited by Jonathan Strahan)
“All the Time We’ve Left to Spend” by Alyssa Wong (Robots vs. Fairies, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe)
“Domestic Violence” by Madeline Ashby (Slate, March 26, 2018)
“Ten Landscapes of Nili Fossae” by Ian McDonald (2001: An Odyssey in Words, edited by Ian Whates and Tom Hunter)
“Prophet of the Roads” by Naomi Kritzer (Infinity’s End, edited by Jonathan Strahan)
“Traces of Us” by Vanessa Fogg (GigaNotoSaurus, March 2018)
“Theories of Flight” by Linda Nagata (Asimov’s Science Fiction, November/December 2018)
“Lab B-15” by Nick Wolven (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, March/April 2018)
“Requiem” by Vandana Singh (Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories, Small Beer Press)
“Sour Milk Girls” by Erin Roberts (Clarkesworld Magazine, January 2018)
“Mother Tongues” by S. Qiouyi Lu (Asimov’s Science Fiction, January/February 2018)
“Singles’ Day” by Samantha Murray (Interzone, September/October 2018)
“Nine Last Days on Planet Earth” by Daryl Gregory (Tor.com, September 19, 2018)
“The Buried Giant” by Lavie Tidhar (Robots vs. Fairies, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe)
“The Anchorite Wakes” by R.S.A. Garcia (Clarkesworld Magazine, August 2018)
“Entropy War” by Yoon Ha Lee (2001: An Odyssey in Words, edited by Ian Whates and Tom Hunter)
“An Equation of State” by Robert Reed (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January/February 2018)
“Quantifying Trust” by John Chu (Mother of Invention, edited by Rivqa Rafael and Tansy Rayner Roberts)
“Hard Mary” by Sofia Samatar (Lightspeed Magazine, September 2018)
“Freezing Rain, a Chance of Falling” by L.X. Beckett (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August 2018)
“Okay, Glory” by Elizabeth Bear (Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Wade Roush)
“Heavy Lifting” by A.T. Greenblatt (Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2018)
“Lions and Gazelles” by Hannu Rajaniemi (Slate, September 27, 2018)
“Different Seas” by Alastair Reynolds (Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Wade Roush)
“Among the Water Buffaloes, a Tiger’s Steps” by Aliette de Bodard (Mechanical Animals, edited by Selena Chambers and Jason Heller)
“Byzantine Empathy” by Ken Liu (Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Wade Roush)
“Meat and Salt and Sparks” by Rich Larson (Tor.com, June 6, 2018)
“Umbernight” by Carolyn Ives Gilman (Clarkesworld Magazine, February 2018)

Cover art: “Behemoth” by Mack Sztaba.

Boskone 2018 Schedule

I’ll be attending Boskone this weekend. My schedule is as-follows:

The Perfect Short Story

15 Feb 2019, Friday 17:00 – 17:50, Marina 4

Neil Clarke, James Patrick Kelly, Elizabeth Hand, Suzanne Palmer, Ellen Datlow

On the page, short fiction is, well, finite. But don’t you remember as much from a great short story as a great novel? Can a short story be perfect in a way a longer fiction can’t? What can you do in a short story that you can’t at greater length? Are SF/F/H short stories different from mainstream shorts in any interesting ways? What are your candidates for perfect genre short stories? What makes them so great?

Kaffeeklatsch: Neil Clarke

15 Feb 2019, Friday 19:00 – 19:50, Galleria – Kaffeeklatsch 1

Got a Great Anthology Idea: Now What?

16 Feb 2019, Saturday 14:00 – 14:50, Marina 2

Robert B. Finegold M.D., Ellen Datlow, Neil Clarke, Julia Rios, Melanie Meadors

From Year’s Best to themed stories, general topics, and shared worlds, any number of concepts would make fantastic anthologies. However, even a great concept can be a hard sell. If great ideas don’t guarantee a sale, what does it really take? What kinds of collections do people want to read, or more to the point, what are they willing to buy? Whether you are a genre luminary who is guest-editing an annual anthology, or a new editor — what are the critical steps to conceiving, planning, and implementing the pitch, sale, and production of an anthology? And what do you do when you just can’t sell the book, despite a list of fantastic contributors?

Gardner Dozois and the Influence of Editors on SF

16 Feb 2019, Saturday 17:00 – 17:50, Harbor II

John R. Douglas, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Neil Clarke, Ellen Asher, Ellen Datlow

Do editors simply publish what readers want to read? Or do their tastes dictate the field’s character and direction? NESFA Press Memorial Guest Gardner Dozois edited Asimov’s magazine from 1984 to 2004, and the Year’s Best SF anthologies from 1984 until his death last year. Our panel of stellar SF/F/H editors will examine his work and their own for insights into editing, writing, reading, and the care and feeding of the fantastic.

Tough Love for New Writers

16 Feb 2019, Saturday 20:00 – 20:50, Burroughs

Brett James, E. C. Ambrose, Neil Clarke, Gillian Daniels, Joe Monti

The writing profession is tough, but not without opportunities. If you have a thin skin, need quick gratification, or aren’t in it for the long haul, give up now. Still interested? Where does a wordsmith go to hone his skill? Where can a writer find a critique group? From online to print, a plethora of publications are accepting submissions. Some of them reject with lightning speed; others take months to say no! But say an acceptance arrives. Some pay; some don’t. What does “success” really mean? And why should you plan on keeping your day job for a long, long time?

Autographing: Neil Clarke, Julie C. Day, S L Huang, Christine Taylor-Butler

17 Feb 2019, Sunday 12:00 – 12:50, Galleria

Clarkesworld Receives Grant to Publishing Korean Science Fiction

In May 2015, Clarkesworld published “An Evolutionary Myth” by Bo-Young Kim, translated from Korean by Gord Sellar and Jihyun Park. I am pleased to announce that Clarkesworld Magazine has now received a grant from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea) to translate and publish nine more Korean science fiction stories in 2019.

The process for selection and translation of stories will be similar to the model developed for Clarkesworld‘s Chinese translation project, which has recently celebrated its fourth anniversary. In that model, a group of people serve as a recommendation team that will provide story notes and details to Neil Clarke for evaluation and selection. Stories will then be confirmed for English language availability, contracted, and assigned to one of several translators.

At present, our schedule calls for the first translation to published in our April issue, replacing a fiction slot currently occupied by a reprint. Stories are scheduled to appear monthly through the end of the year. If a translation is late–we’d rather it be right than rushed–two translations will run in the next available issue.

We are very grateful to LTI Korea for giving us this opportunity to publish more works in translation and look forward to working with a group of authors that is mostly new to English language audiences. I would also like to thank Alex Baek (LTI), YK Yoon (Korea SF Association), Gord Sellar, and Jihyun Park for their input and assistance on both this grant and the project itself.