HEY EVERYBODY I GOT REALLY BUSY AND SO I HAVE A LOT OF NEWS.

1) TONIGHT! at 7 pm Eastern! I will be doing my quarterly book-recommendation podcast with the Ashland Library. (Register here! Or, since I know it’s super-short notice, the video will be on the library’s channel YouTube in a day or two.)

2) I will be appearing at the Pittsburgh Festival of Books on Saturday, May 30th. In (you guessed it) Pittsburgh! I will be on two panels, “How the West Got Weird” and “Speculative Frontiers” with some awesome colleagues. The whole roster of events looks pretty amazing: if you’re in the neighborhood, come on down.

(I also plan to stop by the Carnegie Museum at some point while I’m there and look at dinosaurs. Like you do.)

3) The Folded Sky and “The Witch and the Wyrm” are both nominated for the Locus Award! I am so happy about this, and delighted that readers thought well enough of the novel to nominate it for both the Dragon Award and this. And… I never expected Hacksilver’s little battle with unintended consequences to strike such a chord with folks!

(Voting is rolled into the nomination process for this award, so it’s Schrodinger’s Award and I guess we’ll find out who won… while I am in Pittsburgh at a prior commitment, see above! D’oh!)

4) The White Space series is nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Series! This is my third Hugo nomination for fiction and my first one in almost twenty years, so I am absolutely thrilled to be nominated—and even more thrilled with the company I am keeping in this particular category, which includes some of my dearest friends.

I am also thrilled that my beloved spouse is nominated in the Best Novelette category for his brilliant satire “Kaiju Agonistes.” It’s about Nixon and Nagasaki, not necessarily in that order, and how stupid world affairs can really be.

He talks about it here.

One of the cool things about the Hugo Awards is that they are voted on by the members of the WSFS (World Science Fiction Society), which is the organization that puts on the Worldcon every year. That means that anyone who is a member of the WSFS in a given year can vote in that year’s Hugos, and nominate for the next year, as well.

Membership, if you are not attending Worldcon, is $50, which is not insignificant but does come with significant perks, including access to the Hugo Voter’s Packet, a collection of most of the Hugo Nominated works for download. This year that packet includes the entirety of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series; all of my White Space books; all of Katherine Addison’s Osreth books; Ada Palmer’s magnum opus Inventing the Renaissance; works by Amal El-Mohtar and Annalee Newitz… I could be here all day, frankly.

It’s 16 gigabytes of books. I’m not kidding.

If you are not a member and would like to be, you can register here. I absolutely urge you to read as many of these remarkable works as you can and vote for your favorites. And nominate next year. You don’t have to have read everything published in a given year to vote/nominate—the more people who participate in the process the better the wisdom of the crowd works out.

(If you would like to attend Worldcon as a virtual attendee, that’s a few more dollars that gets you access to a bunch of things like virtual panels and so forth, and of course the physical attending membership is a bit more again (plus travel and expenses obvs.).)

...and that's it for now! Phew!

Sorry about the paucity of updates recently--everything has been kind of busy here! More soon, I hope!

Best,

Bear