UPDATED: Aurora Award nominations are now OPEN! You can find details about how to vote here. Nominations close on April 6 at 23:59 EDT

Well, it appears that ’tis the season! I see lots of awards eligibility posts popping up from authors I know, and since everyone else is jumping off a cliff…

It’s actually been a crazy busy year for me, with not only a couple of short stories published, but my first forays into editing anthologies now under my belt! You can find details below.

And, since you’re here, I’m going to take the liberty of letting you know about the wonderful stories by Canadians that appeared in those anthologies. Again, see below, and thanks for your consideration.

– S.

Anthologies (eligible in the Aurora Award for Best Related Work category)

• Game On!, edited by Stephen Kotowych and Tony Pi (ZNB, July 2023)
  • Games are about more than winning and losing. They’re about risk and reward, strategy and blind fortune, our need to win and our fear of being outplayed. And when magic and science infuse a game, the stakes can be of cosmic importance. Each move could decide life or death. Are you ready to play?
  • Featuring new stories by Aliette de Bodard, Cat Rambo, James Alan Gardner, Ed Greenwood, Sean Williams, and many more
  • “…each story exhibit[s] wry and subtle writing embedded with numerous original concepts. A feast for the imagination, I’d say. Highly recommended.” – Amazing Stories
• Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction: Volume One, edited by Stephen Kotowych (Ansible Press, December 2023)
  • Award winners. Award finalists. Hidden gems. All Canadian. All in one anthology. Curated from top markets like Analog, F&SF, Lightspeed, On Spec, Strange Horizons, and Tor.com, the Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction is your definitive guide to the very best fantastical fiction written by Canadians today.
  • “[A] real powerhouse of quality fiction sparkling with originality, brilliant perception and sophisticated subtlety; the kind of reading session which leaves me feeling inspired and excited… In my opinion, this volume of The Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction belongs on every Canadian reader’s bookshelf. The second volume is underway. I’d like to see it become an annual tradition. As many readers of my reviews are aware, there is a lot of excellent genre fiction being written in Canada. May this series become the definitive annual sample…You owe it to yourself to purchase it for your bookshelf.” – Amazing Stories
  • “Overall, it is a great collection, [and] a great reflection on what Canadian speculative fiction has to offer…” – The Ottawa Review of Books

Short Stories for Your Consideration

If I may be allowed a little bit of log rolling… The following are short stories that appeared in Game On!, the anthology of original SFF that I edited this year. While I am biased, I think these are wonderful stories and deserve your consideration this award season.

I’ve included the full TOC so you can see the overall calibre of the stories, and have noted each eligible Canadian author. I hope you’ll keep those Canadians in mind for the Aurora Award for Best Short Story category.

Game On!