Neil Clarke's Blog, page 13

Kickstarter Update

The Kickstarter for One Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight and Other Stories by Xia Jia has reached the 50% mark in its first week! Still a long way to go, but this is very good news. Later this week, I’ll be posting the first of our stretch goals to the campaign page, but in the meantime…

Today is the Spring Festival, the first day of the Year of the Pig.  It’s the perfect time to read (or re-read) Xia Jia’s story about common people’s life in near future China, “Spring Festival: Happiness, Anger, Love, Sorrow, Joy” (translated by Ken Liu) at: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/xia_09_14/ 

If you enjoyed that story and would like to see more of her work translated into English, please consider supporting this campaign or telling some friends about it.

Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award

SFWA announced this yesterday:

Kate Wilhelm Solstice Awards To Be Presented to Nisi Shawl and Neil Clarke

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA, Inc.) is pleased to announce that the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Awards will be presented to Nisi Shawl and Neil Clarke at the 54th Annual Nebula Conference.

The Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award is given by SFWA for distinguished contributions to the science fiction and fantasy community. Shawl and Clarke join the ranks of previous winners, including Octavia E. Butler, James Tiptree, Jr., Tom Doherty, Carl Sagan, and Sheila Williams. The award ceremony will be a part of the SFWA Nebula Conference taking place at the Warner Center Marriott in Woodland Hills, CA on May 16th-19th, 2019.

Full press release here: nebulas.sfwa.org/sfwa-announces-the-2019-kate-wilhelm-solstice-award-recipients

I’m simply overwhelmed and grateful to SFWA for this honor. Thanks to everyone that has been sending me congratulations. At one point Twitter stopped letting me reply thinking I was spamming. I’m still speechless. I mean, look at the previous winners. Nisi and I just joined a very elite club. (Congrats Nisi!)

A Hundred Ghost Parade Tonight on Kickstarter

For months now, we’ve been talking about how we could expand on the translation work at Clarkesworld and open the door just a little bit wider. One of the things we came up with was a short fiction oriented small press that is focused on translations… and so Clarkesworld Books (yes, re-purposing the old bookstore’s name) was born.

Tonight we launched a Kickstarter campaign for our debut project, A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight, the first English-language collection by Chinese author Xia Jia. I’ve published several of her stories at Clarkesworld and this collection will make several more available to English language readers. Personally, I can’t wait to read them.

Check out the campaign here:

www.kickstarter.com/projects/clarkesworld/a-hundred-ghosts-parade-tonight-and-other-stories

If you are unfamiliar with her work, the campaign includes links to several free stories. I do hope you’ll consider supporting this project.

Oh and check out this art we have for the cover…

2018 Nominations for Best Clarkesworld story and art

The nomination phase for the annual Clarkesworld poll is now open. Nominate your three favorite 2018 CW stories and covers. The top five will go onto the next round. Nomination phase closes Friday at 8PM EST.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/W7T3YCT

The Eagle has Landed: Contents and Cover

THE EAGLE HAS LANDED

Night Shade Books – July 2019

ISBN-10: 1597809993 (trade paperback), 1949102092 (hardcover)

ISBN-13: 978-1597809993 (tradepaperback), 978-1949102093 (hardcover)

On July 20, 1969, mankind made what had only years earlier seemed like an impossible leap forward: when Apollo 11 became the first manned mission to land on the moon, and Neil Armstrong the first person to step foot on the lunar surface.

While there have only been a handful of new missions since, the fascination with our planet’s satellite continues, and generations of writers and artists have imagined the endless possibilities of lunar life. From adventures in the vast gulf of space between the earth and the moon, to journeys across the light face to the dark side, to the establishment of permanent residences on its surface, science fiction has for decades given readers bold and forward-thinking ideas about our nearest interstellar neighbor and what it might mean to humankind, both now and in our future.

The Eagle Has Landed collects the best stories written in the fifty years since mankind first stepped foot on the lunar surface, serving as a shining reminder that the moon is and always has been our most visible and constant example of all the infinite possibility of the wider universe.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Bagatelle by John Varley
The Eve of the Last Apollo by Carter Scholz
The Lunatics by Kim Stanley Robinson
Griffin’s Egg by Michael Swanwick
A Walk in the Sun by Geoffrey A. Landis
Waging Good by Robert Reed
How We Lost the Moon by Paul McAuley
People Came From Earth by Stephen Baxter
Ashes and Tombstones by Brian Stableford
Sunday Night Yams at Minnie and Earl’s by Adam Troy Castro
Stories for Men by John Kessel
The Clear Blue Seas of Luna by Gregory Benford
You Will Go to the Moon by William Preston
SeniorSource by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
The Economy of Vacuum by Sarah Thomas
The Cassandra Project by Jack McDevitt
Fly Me to the Moon by Marianne J. Dyson
Tyche and the Ants by Hannu Rajaniemi
The Moon Belongs to Everyone by Michael Alexander and K.C. Ball
The Fifth Dragon by Ian McDonald
Let Baser Things Devise by Berrien C. Henderson
The Moon is Not a Battlefield by Indrapramit Das
Every Hour of Light and Dark by Nancy Kress
In Event of Moon Disaster by Rich Larson
Permissions
About the Editor

Cover art by Mack Sztaba

Preorder from:

Amazon: Trade Paperback, Hardcover

Brazil: Trade Paperback, Hardcover
Canada: Trade Paperback, Hardcover
France: Trade Paperback, Hardcover
Germany: Trade Paperback, Hardcover
Japan: Trade Paperback, Hardcover
Spain: Trade Paperback, Hardcover
UK: Trade Paperback, Hardcover


Barnes & Noble: Trade Paperback, Hardcover
Booksamillion: Trade Paperback, Hardcover
Powells: Trade Paperback

Available in ebook from:

Coming Soon

Clarkesworld Tourism Posters

I’ve been having fun with some stock art. Click on the images for a better look.

Project Update: The Eagle has Landed

All acceptance and rejection letters have been sent out for THE EAGLE HAS LANDED anthology. If you submitted something and haven’t heard from me, then your (rejection) letter has gone to spam or been eaten by the internet.

Table of contents and cover will be likely be revealed after the holidays. The book is currently scheduled for publication in hardcover, trade paperback, and ebook on July 18th, which is as close to the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing (July 20th) as we could get.

Supporting SF/F in Schools

Every year, I try to support at least one underfunded school project that involves science fiction & fantasy literature in the curriculum. I found and pushed one to fully-funded today. Maybe you can too. Take a look at https://www.donorschoose.org/ and see if there’s something you can get behind.

Philcon 2018

I’ll be at Philcon this year and have the following items on my schedule:

Sat 11:00 AM in Autograph Table—Autographs: Saturday 11am (3346)

Neil Clarke, Joan Wendland

Sat 2:00 PM in Plaza III (Three)—The Robot “Other” (3087)

Creating empathy for humanity’s not-quite-human creations was groundbreaking with Frankenstein, but now, stories told from the perspective of A.I. are common enough that they’ve become their own sub-genre. How do these stories affect how we perceive ourselves? Have we reached the point where we have more empathy for robots than we do for other humans?

Joan Wendland (mod), Anastasia Klimchynskaya, Barna William Donovan, Neil Clarke, David Walton

Sat 8:00 PM in Plaza II (Two)—Meet the Editors! (3040)

Magazine and small press editors discuss what goes into creating their publications, from the economics of staying viable in the electronic age to getting appropriate submissions.

Hildy Silverman (mod), Darrell Schweitzer, Joshua Palmatier, Alex Shvartsman, Neil Clarke, Ian Randal Strock

No dealer’s room for me, so I’ll just be wandering around enjoying the convention. If you are looking to get a copy of NOT ONE OF US signed, I’ve made arrangements for a dealer to stock them. I’ll also have a few with me at my signing.

World Fantasy Weekend 2018

I spent last weekend at the World Fantasy Convention in Baltimore and had a great time even though I spent a large chunk of it behind my table in a very slow moving dealer’s room–no worries, I went in expecting it to be more marketing-oriented thing than sales. Staying in one place made it a lot easier for people to find me and I had a lot of enjoyable conversations with artists, authors, and readers.

Not all that long ago, the World Fantasy Awards changed the award from “the big ugly head” to a bronze award created by Vincent Villafranca. Vincent is an amazing artist and, in addition to the 2013 Hugo Award he made, I am proud to own a few of his smaller works. This year, the art show featured several of Vincent’s works, including various prototypes and molds used in the process of creating the award. It was fascinating to see and I’m so glad they did this. Far too often, what goes on behind-the-scenes in the creative process is ignored, so I applaud that they made this possible for all to enjoy. (There was a lot to enjoy in this year’s art show.)

Despite changing the award, the nominee pins remained the same–a smaller version of the head. This year’s convention team took it on themselves to work with Vincent and create a matching nominee pin that was the envy of many previous nominees, myself included. I have to praise their efforts to make this happen. I wish I had taken picture of one. Maybe a nominee (or winners, congratulations, by the way) will post a shot of theirs soon.

This year’s convention was also the first I’ve seen to feature a consignment table–likely influenced by SFWA’s efforts at Worldcon earlier this year. This allowed attending authors to bring some of their books and have them available for sale at the con. From what I could see, it appeared to be quite successful and helped out a lot of authors who wouldn’t have been well-represented by the regular book dealers. I know World Fantasy has some weird rules about the dealer’s room that might have prevented it, but this table should have been inside with the rest of us. If other’s follow Baltimore’s lead–and they should–that’s the one improvement they can make.

Conventions are volunteer-run events and as such, there will always be little glitches and mistakes. I know there were a few, but ultimately, I didn’t care. This convention was better than many “professionally-operated” events I’ve attended and people seemed to be having a genuinely good time. That’s the bar I set and adding the extras I’ve mentioned causes me to rate this year’s con quite highly.  Congratulations and thank you to everyone that worked on it!