Another shout-out, Aurora season, and other fine Things in the New Year...

That's the kind of header you get when you have no one thing but many unrelated things to talk about in one day. So let us get to it, Yard-Apes.

First, thanks to Daniel Rabuzzi, whose novel The Choir Boats was released to much happy fanfare from ChiZine Publications, about the same time as Monstrous Affections. He too has a blog, Lobsters and Canaries, and he offered up a year-end summation of pretty much everything, in which he spared many kind words for my short story writing chops. To whit:

David Nickle, Monstrous Affections. A master of economical story-telling successful at raising the hairs on the back of your neck. A skewed and disturbing worldview. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you for sharing, Daniel.

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It is Aurora season, yard-apes, which means that loving fans, readers, and self-loving authors get to nominate short stories, novels, and - ahem - collections and anthologies by Canadians or non-Canadians who live here for the fan-selected Canadian speculative fiction award.

Yard-apes who are considering nominating a David Nickle work for an Aurora Award will not find discouragement here. Below, find a list of eligible work:

In the best long-form work in English category:


In the best short-form work in English category:


This isn't all about me, though. Other works I'd recommend you take a look at are (in long form English) Tesseracts Thirteen, edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and David Morrell (EDGE) (actually as an anthology, I think this goes into Best English Language Other), The Sunless Countries by Karl Schroeder (TOR), Objects of Worship by Claude Lalumiere (ChiZine), and (in short form English) "Off-Track Betting" by Madeline Ashby (FLURB), "A Patch of Bamboo" by Jill Snider Lum (Tesseracts Thirteen), and "The Island" by Peter Watts (The New Space Opera 2). Best Artist, I think, has got to go to Erik Mohr for The Tel Aviv Dossier, Monstrous Affections, Objects of Worship, The Choir Boats and The World More Full of Weeping, all from ChiZine Publications this past year.

You can nominate on-line or by post here.
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Now on to the Other Fine Things category. The aforementioned Peter Watts this past year wrote but did not publish what he describes as his first piece of fanfic since 1976: "The Things," a blood-soaked hard-sf meditation on the premise of John Carpenter's classic sf/horror film The Thing. Here in the early days of 2010, he has now also published it, at the online sf 'zine Clarkesworld. You can read it here. And you can listen to a kickass podcast reading of the story, by Kate Baker at the same time as you're reading (right here - the player's at the bottom of the page) - which is what I did.

The story's goddamn brilliant. Go listen to it/read it. Then put it on your lists for 2010 awards.

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