A short story is like a pie because, first, you can do one relatively quickly. Second, everyone likes pie.

Third, with both short stories and pie, you can use the finest ingredients in the world and still come up with an inedible mess.

Award-winning author and editor Jennifer Brozek has edited over ten anthologies (with more on the way in 2013). The creative director of Apocalypse Ink Productions, she also has won both the Origins and the ENnie awards for her work writing for RPG companies, contributing to a long list of sourcebooks that include Dragonlance, Shadowrun, and White Wolf SAS.

When people speak of works that “have withstood the test of time” it’s worthwhile asking “Withstood for what?” and “Withstood for whom?” For instance, The Malleus Maleficarum is indeed an immortal work, but it’s not remembered for the reasons its authors and admirers might have wished. The same nuancing holds for classic SF. Overlapping this is the forelock tugging to so-called “hard” SF that, inter alia, seems to still hew to the fifties concept that only physics and astronomy are quantitative sciences.

SFWA has named Gene Wolfe as the 2012 recipient of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award for his contributions to the literature of Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Bear, the award-winning science fiction and fantasy author and purveyor of the delicious salt caramels currently gracing my desk, knows that food and cooking are key to worldbuilding. In many of her 23 novels, you’ll find reference to, if not outright instructions for, how a particular culture feeds itself.

Don DeLillo wrote: “One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it’s the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language.”

Can the same thing be said about a writer’s connection to the work of another?

Based on 1,922 ballots received, the second highest total ever, the 2012 Hugo Awards go to…

Harry Harrison (March 12, 1925-August 15, 2012) passed away early today. Best known for the film Soylent Green, Harry was also a SFWA Grand Master, a pioneer of genre, and a colorful personality. He will be greatly missed.

Authors Sharon Lee and Steve Miller announced today that they will release the Liaden Universe® in audio format on Audible.com, concurrent with the hardcover release of newest book in the series, Dragon Ship, from Baen Books.

by Deborah Walker Ideas for my stories come to me in museums, in galleries, in libraries. Find me upstairs (and it’s always quieter upstairs) in the British Museum trawling the past looking for future inspiration. Old books, paintings, objects are part of our material heritage. Survivors of the ravages of times, sometimes cherished throughout the […]