Happy Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction: Volume One Publication Day to all who celebrate…which I hope will be all of you!

That’s right—the trade paperback and e-book of Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction: Volume One is now available (links below)!

This thing is all killer, no filler, folks. I know you’re going to love it!

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/ebook/year-s-best-canadian-fantasy-and-science-fiction-volume-one

Amazon Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/Years-Canadian-Fantasy-Science-Fiction-ebook/dp/B0CP88Q46M/

Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/Years-Canadian-Fantasy-Science-Fiction-ebook/dp/B0CP88Q46M/

Everywhere else (incl. B&N, Apple Books, Smashwords, overseas retailers, etc.): https://books2read.com/u/m06V50

S.

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!

I’m thrilled this morning to announce the full Table of Contents for Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction: Volume One!

• Give Me English – Ai Jiang
• The Voice of a Thousand Years – Fawaz Al-Matrouk
• Bottom’s Dream – Glenn Clifton
• And in the Arcade, Ego – Kate Heartfield
• The Secret Lives of Shellwomen – Geneviève Blouin. Translated from the French by Margaret Sankey
•  Poem: In Stock Images of the Future, Everything is White – Terese Mason Pierre
• Michif Man – Chelsea Vowel
• Sunday in the Park With Hank – Leah Bobet
• A New Brave World – Eric Choi
• Poltergeist – Rhonda Parrish
• One Day in the Afterlife of Detective Roshni Chaddha – Rati Mehrotra
• Big Trouble in Droidtown – Hayden Trenholm
•  Poem: First Contact – Lisa Timpf
• Distant Skies – Charlotte Ashley
• Shattered – Marie Bilodeau
•  Poem: Necklace – Carolyn Clink
• All That Burns Unseen – Premee Mohamed
•  Poem: Rapunzel in the Desert – Melissa Yuan-Innes
• Redfin Spine – Jonathan Olfert
• Maximum Efficiency – Holly Schofield
• Choose Your Own – C. J. Lavigne
•  Poem: After the Apocalypse – Colleen Anderson
• Rare Earths Pineapple – Michèle Laframboise
• Choke – Suyi Davies Okungbowa
•  Poem: Three Herons – Geoffrey W. Cole
• Folk Hero Motifs in Tales Told by the Dead – KT Bryski
• Vi’Hun Heal – Michelle Tang
• Bleak Communion of Abandoned Things – Ariel Marken Jack
•  Poem: a sinkhole invites a street to consider its future – Dominik Parisien
• Broken Vow: The Adventures of Flick Gibson, Intergalactic Videographer – Peter G. Reynolds
• Green Witch – Elizabeth Whitton
•  Poem: The Mall at Night – Millie Ho
• Homeplus – Liz Westbrook-Trenholm
• Into the Frozen Wilds – P.A. Cornell
•  Poem: The Wolf of Your Passions – Lynne Sargent
• Critical Mass – Peter Watts
• Douen – Suzan Palumbo

The volume will also include an Introduction from yours truly.

Backers of the Kickstarter will be receiving their e-books and print copies in November, and the book will be available to book lovers everywhere December 5, 2023 at your favourite independent, brick-and-mortar, or online book retailer.

This thing is all killer, no filler, y’all. Can’t wait to get it into your hands!

– S.

Thrilled to see this glowing review of GAME ON! from Amazing Stories, the oldest science fiction magazine in the world, launched in April 1926 by Hugo Gernsback himself (for whom the Hugo Awards are named).

While the reviewer only reviews some stories in-depth, overall he concludes by saying “…each story exhibit[s] wry and subtle writing embedded with numerous original concepts. A feast for the imagination I’d say. Highly recommended.”

My co-editor Tony and I couldn’t agree more.

I’m thrilled to announce my new Kickstarter for the Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction: Volume One.

The campaign launches at noon EST on June 6, but in the meantime please follow this link and click the ‘Notify me on launch’ button to be told the minute it is live.

The world needs more Canada (as the old saying goes) and that includes a showcase anthology of the best short fiction the Canadian SFF community publishes every year. I’ll be acting as the volume editor and publisher through my imprint, Ansible Press.

If you are at all inclined to back the project, please do so on the first day—preferably as close to noon EST as you can. That early momentum will help juice the algorithm and help get the project noticed (at least, so I’m told).

And please feel free (and encouraged!) to share that link around. The more followers the campaign has prior to launch and the more backer activity the project gets in the first few hours of launch (even at the lowest levels of support) also helps boost the project in the Kickstarter algorithm and will help drive organic reach (i.e.: people just stumbling across it on Kickstarter).

Don’t forget to use the hashtags #CanadaYearsBestFSF and #KickstarterReads when you share on social media, and if you mention the campaign on Twitter please tag @KickstarterRead (no ‘s’). And steal that promo image above, too, and share it around!

Note to those of you in the US, UK, and EU, remember: this campaign is running in Canadian dollars, so with your positive exchange rate it’s like I’m practically giving this book away! ? YMMV for exchange rates from other countries.

#CanadaYearsBestFSF #KickstarterReads

I’m really fascinated by the prospects and power of artificial intelligence (AI) as a creative tool…but this is bonkers.

Bobby Geraghty, a 32-year-old singer, songwriter and producer, along with his band Breezer, recorded an eight-song album of Oasis-esque tunes and then trained an AI on a cappella recordings of Oasis singer Liam Gallagher so the AI could stand in as the lead singer.

The result is eerily good.

If you’d told me this was a lost Oasis album from 1998, I’d have believed you. If you were an Oasis fan back in the mid to late 90s (or covered any of their songs at coffee houses, like a certain blogger who shall remain nameless) this album by AIsis (get it?) will bring you back.

If you’d told me this was a lost Oasis album from 1998, I’d have believed you. Not sure the guitar style or tone is 100% Noel Gallagher, but I might not have put my finger on that if I hadn’t known in advance it was another band playing.

I’d always assumed AI would eventually be able to replicate the sound of dead singers or actors…but it was always one of those things that would happen in the future, instead of the now.

Can The BeAItles or Frank SinAItra be far behind? O brave new world, that has such algorithms in’t!

Better listen to it quick, though: an AI song that replicates Drake and The Weeknd’s vocals that went viral (15 million+ streams!) has already been pulled from multiple streaming platforms following a copyright complaint from label Universal Music Group (UMG).

Well, it snuck by without my noticing, but my story “The Book of Elevated Things” is now available to read (for free!) on the Factor Four website. It was the lead story in the March 2023 issue. You can find it here.

This story was inspired by a comment my then-4-year-old daughter made and was written almost entirely while waiting to pick her up from dance class. As parents, writers have to find the time to write when we can…

Now that contracts are all signed and everything is stamped-it-no-erasies legal, I’m happy to announce that I’ve sold a new story to Factor Four Magazine.

This story, “The Book of Elevated Things,” was inspired by a comment my then-4-year-old daughter made and was written almost entirely while waiting to pick her up from dance class. ?

Not sure on a pub date yet, but watch this space.

Very pleased that my latest story, “I Think That I Shall Never See,” is available in the online magazine Little Blue Marble. It’s free to read, so check it out now.

This is a short piece of Cli-Fi (climate fiction) inspired by a line from a Joni Mitchell song (shouldn’t be hard to figure out which one…) and my own deep love of trees.

Hope you enjoy!

Okay, writers–the post you’ve all been waiting for: “What is this guy looking for in the submissions, and what will give me the best chance of selling him a story?”

So here’s what I want, and (perhaps just as important) what I don’t want–but one caveat! I am speaking only for myself here. My co-editor, Tony Pi, will have his own thoughts on what he’ll be looking for. But he has great taste, so I’m sure we’ll end up with some really hard choices between the best-of-the-best stories.

What I want

• Stories that follow the theme, obviously: In GAME ON!, we’re looking for unique science fiction and fantasy takes on games, game playing, and games in culture. A game or games—real or imagined from across all of time and space—should be central to the story in some fashion.
• Stories that look at how games and gaming reflect or comment on character and or society, history, etc. The story should be about a character or characters, not just the game. Think of the game as a lens.
• Bonus points for unique/unexpected takes on theme. Surprise and delight me with your creativity and cleverness! I’d really love to see takes on the theme that I would never have thought of in a million years.
• Real world games. I went over some the other day. And if you think of ones I missed, so much the better!
• Amongst real-world games, I welcome authors writing about non-Western games and little-known games (for example, games popular only regionally, or games from the past that aren’t played much anymore, such as the card game Whist from the 18th and 19th Century, or the ancient Egyptian game of senet from ~3100 BC). What’s unique that you can bring to the theme? Show me something no one else is going to.
• Made-up and invented games from both science fiction and fantasy perspectives. I’m especially keen on seeing these! Stories could take place in our world (or a version thereof), in the far future, on an alien planet, or in the deepest magical forest or most exotic fantasy setting. What games do aliens play? What games entertain the fey? And what do they show us about those cultures and creatures?
• Clever takes on proprietary games that we can’t use by name for copyright and legal reasons. Riff on a game we all know! If you send me a well-written, engaging story that is a wink and a nod to, say, Monopoly or Clue but which cleverly never references anything that could get us served with a cease-and-desist letter from Milton Bradley, you will definitely have my attention. Look at Matthew Johnson’s story “Heroic Measures” from his collection Irregular Verbs and Other Stories for a story that is clearly about Superman without ever mentioning Superman. It is an example of a wonderfully written, character-driven story that pulls this trick off beautifully.
• Action and adventure and a sense of wonder are most welcome. But also give me characters I care about and who I can live the story through.
• We will probably be getting a lot of fantasy—which is great! But I’m definitely going to want to include science fiction in this collection, so that might increase your odds of acceptance (given SF will likely be a smaller pool). Send me stories that are anywhere from “soft”, more sociological science fiction to “hard”, nuts-and-bolts of physics type of science fiction.
• I really hope to find some humorous stories that make me laugh. Bonus points if the story makes some clever commentary or makes me think.
• A positive outlook. This doesn’t have to be true for every story, but I’d like it at least a ray of light here and there in the collection. We’ve all lived through a lot of real-world downers over the last number of years and while I like a good sad or melancholy ending as much as anybody, I do find myself drawn especially to something hopeful or positive or—dare I say it?—stories with a happy ending.

What I don’t want

• Anything that would be traditionally considered a sport. So no football, no rollerball, etc. Editors’ discretion will trump any argument here about what does or doesn’t count as a sport, thank you.
• Stories that center around the same specific games our anchor authors have chosen.
• Stories that are just thinly veiled explanations of how to play a game, even a made-up one. The secret is you don’t really need to know much about the rules of a particular game to have a story that involves a game. See my related post about the game Strategema in Star Trek: The Next Generation for an example. We want character, and plot, and conflict, and action, and change. Will leave the rulebooks to Hoyle’s.
• There’s the potential for a lot of “space chess” or “fantasy poker” type stories, so if that’s your plan, okay, but it had better be The Best version of such a story ever written because we’ll only take a max of one of each. Likewise, with traditional playing card games of all kinds—we won’t want to fill the book just with stories about Hearts, Bridge, etc. And one of our anchor stories is already about euchre, so…
• Dark or horror stories are fine but be warned: I’m not going to be super receptive to exceedingly violent stories or stories focused on gore or splatterpunk. But give me creepy, unnerving, unsettling stories that make the hairs on the back of my next stand up and make me not want to turn out the lights before bed? Yes, please!

GAME ON!

– S.