The finalists have been announced for the 2012 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best SF novel. They are:

• Ready Player One, Ernest Cline (Crown)
• This Shared Dream, Kathleen Ann Goonan (Tor)
• Soft Apocalypse, Will McIntosh (Night Shade Books)
• Embassytown, China Miéville (Del Rey)
• The Islanders, Christopher Priest (Gollancz)
• The Highest Frontier, Joan Slonczewski (Tor)
• Dancing with Bears, Michael Swanwick (Night Shade)
• Osama, Lavie Tidhar (PS Publishing)
• Robopocalypse, Daniel H. Wilson (Simon & Schuster)
• Home Fires, Gene Wolfe (Tor)
• Seed, Rob Ziegler (Night Shade Books)

Full details HERE

The first in a science fiction apocalyptic novel series, ARIA: Left Luggage by BFS member Geoff Nelder, will be released by LL-Publications on 1 August 2012. The cover is by award-winning artist Andy Bigwood. The book will be published in paperback and electronic formats.

“Today, Jack caught a bug at work. He catches a bus home. By the time he disembarks in the desert town of Rosamond, all the other passengers and the driver have fuzzy heads. Jack had caught an amnesia bug, and it’s infectious.

Imagine the ramifications…”

Further information HERE

Jonathan Oliver, commissioning editor of Abaddon Books, has acquired Satan’s Reach, a second Weird Space SF novel by Eric Brown.  This follows on from Eric’s soon-to-be-published The Devil’s Nebula. The novel will be delivered in 2013. The agent was John Jarrold and the deal is for UK/US rights.

Eric Brown said:  “I’m excited about doing the second book in the Weird Space series – a seat-of-the-pants adventure entitled Satan’s Reach about a telepath on the run from the Expansion authorities and the bounty hunter who will stop at nothing to get him – and what they find on a far-flung planet in the badlands of  Satan’s Reach. It’s space opera with the emphasis on starships, aliens, exotic worlds – and the perennial threat from the Weird.”

The Locus Science Fiction Foundation has announced the top five finalists in each category of the 2012 Locus Awards. The winners will be announced during the Science Fiction Awards Weekend to be held in Seattle, USA in June 2012.

View the full list of finalists HERE

Rob Hansen is compiling an internet resource – THEN: The Archive – which is a repository for some of the material referenced when researching and writing THEN, his history-in-progress of British science fiction fandom from the 1930s to the 1980s.

He is seeking a photograph of the frontage of the Imperial Hotel in Birmingham. The hotel hosted several SF and fantasy events before it was demolished, including some early FantasyCons. Here, from the archive, is a page detailing the 1959 Eastercon held at that venue. Rob would love to be able to add a photo of the hotel frontage to this page.

If you can assist by providing a photograph of the frontage of the Imperial Hotel, please contact Peter Coleborn at pkcoleborn [at] gmail [dot] com. Please do not send the photograph in the first instance but simply contact Peter explaining what photo(s) you have.

SFScope reports that a number of Octavia E. Butler‘s acclaimed and award-winning SF novels will be published in electronic format for the first time by Open Road Integrated Media. These include the Nebula Award-winning Parable of the Talents and the Xenogenesis trilogy.

Butler, who died in 2006, was the first African-American woman to come to prominence as a SF writer, dealing in her writings with issues such as race, religion, gender and social structure.

Read the full story HERE

StarShipSofa #235 is available for download, with fiction including Contact Authority by William Mitchell and The Paradise Aperture by David Carani, Science News from J.J. Campanella and a feature on the Writers of The Future XXVIII contest. Details HERE

Meanwhile, the most recent issue of its ‘sister’ podcast, Tales To Terrify, contains the following:

The Whisperer in Darkness (film) by Larry Santoro
Short Fiction: Memory by H.P. Lovecraft
Fact: Horror Anarchy and Doom by Andy Remic
Poetry: Thumb by Martin Mundt
Main Fiction: The 11th Day by Christopher Fowler

Details HERE

Gollancz has acquired a three-book fantasy series by Stephen Hunt.  The first novel is titled In Dark Service, while the trilogy is called The Far-Called.  The first volume will be published in 2013.

Stephen is the author of six fantasy novels published by HarperCollins Voyager in the UK and Tor in the US, as well as in various translation editions, and runs the SF Crowsnest news and reviews site.

Here is Stephen’s introduction to the world on which this series takes place:

“Plenas has two unique characteristics worth noting, the first – and most significant of which – is that it’s a world on a mind-boggling scale where peddler caravans can take a thousand years to complete a limited circuit of their trade territory, a land where the guild of radio signallers can relay messages between their stations for multiple lifetimes and still never make a clean circumnavigation of the globe.

It is a world where, should a youngster be gripped by wanderlust, they can simply head off and travel with merchant nomads for their entire lifetime, taking in thousands of exotic nations, strange races and mysterious wonders, while still only travelling across a minute fraction of the globe.

The second distinctive facet of Plenas is that the land has no mineral resources worth mining except around the stratovolcanoes dotted across the world, massive shield volcanoes that stand about three times the elevation of Mount Everest above sea level. These vomit out great gobs of ore-bearing rocks into the air for harvesting by sky mines, and this wealth is always jealously hoarded by the empires that rise to pre-eminence around the stratovolcanoes, growing rich with their monopoly over metals, crystals and coals.

Reliance on sustainable resources means that most societies, races and nations on Plenas are throttled somewhere between a Roman and Victorian level of progress, with only the great empires of the stratovolcanoes reaching a higher level of development.”

The deal for World Rights was brokered by the John Jarrold Literary Agency.

SFScope reports that the winners of the 2011 BSFA Awards, announced at the recent Eastercon weekend in London, were:

Best Novel: The Islanders by Christopher Priest (Gollancz)

Best Short Fiction: The Copenhagen Interpretation by Paul Cornell (Asimov’s Science Fiction)

Best Non-Fiction: The SF Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition, edited by John Clute, Peter Nicholls and David Langford (Gollancz website)

Best Art: Cover of Ian Whates’ The Noise Revealed (Solaris) by Dominic Harman

Congratulations to all the winners!

The 2012 Hugo and Campbell Awards nominees have been announced. Nominees for Best Novel include A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin (Bantam; Harper Voyager UK) and Embassytown by China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan). Other nominees include: three episodes of Doctor Who are nominated in the category of Best Dramatic Presentation – Short; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 is one of the nominees for Best Dramatic Presentation – Long; Interzone (TTA Press) has received a nomination in the Best Semiprozine category; and StarShipSofa has been nominated in the Best Fancast category.

The full list of nominees is available HERE

Also, Locus reports that the 2012 Philip K. Dick Award for a “distinguished original science fiction paperback published for the first time during 2011 in the US” has gone to The Samuil Petrovitch Trilogy by Simon Morden (Orbit). A special citation was given to The Company Man by Robert Jackson Bennett (Orbit).

Full details HERE