Robot Wizard Zombie Crit! is my new newsletter, which will bring you updates about my anthologies and other projects, including Lightspeed and Nightmare. Plus, you’ll get my thoughts about books, short stories, TV and film, roleplaying games, and related subjects. Subscribers will receive Robot Wizard Zombie Crit! Stories: Volume One as a free reward for subscribing. Delivered to your inbox once a week, starting January 2025.
Here’s an update with all of OUT THERE SCREAMING’s award nominations and wins:
Not too shabby!
OUT THERE SCREAMING, edited by Jordan Peele (and me!), hit the New York Times bestseller list. That’s a big accomplishment for any book, but is basically unheard of for an anthology, so it’s kind of extra exciting. It debuted at #15!
“One kickass good anthology […] Every one of these stories is, as advertised, far-future, galaxy-spanning, and involves people confronting huge problems caused by technology, in some cases so advanced as to be, as Arthur C. Clarke said, “indistinguishable from magic.” […] Highly recommended.” –File 770, on COSMIC POWERS [review]
“Astonishingly good […] Rich in great stories.” —Rocket Stack Rank, on COSMIC POWERS [review]
The reviewer singled out “Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance” by Tobias S. Buckell as the best story in the book, giving it 5/5 stars. They also highly recommended the stories by Charlie Jane Anders, Adam-Troy Castro, Seanan McGuire, and Yoon Ha Lee. Each story gets a minireview at the link.
I’m pleased to reveal the cover for Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017, and announce that this volume’s guest editor.
Our guest editor this year is Charles Yu. He is the author of the novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, His short fiction has also appeared in Playboy, Esquire.com, Wired Magazine and Wired.com, Lightspeed, The Oxford American, and Vice.com, among other anthologies and magazines, as well as in two collections: Third Class Superhero and Sorry Please Thank You. I’ve also published him in a number of my own anthologies, including Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, and Press Start to Play; fun fact: if you mashed up the latter two stories, you basically get HBO’s hit TV show Westworld, for which Charlie worked as a scriptwriter and the story editor on season one.
The table of contents has also been selected, but it will be kept under wraps for a while yet. (It will likely be announced some time in July.) Meanwhile, though, the book is available for pre-order:
“The newest short story collection edited by Adams resonates with a buoyancy that can often be lost in contemporary science fiction, reminding us that futuristic doesn’t always have to mean gritty. But don’t take that to mean that these stories lack depth or feeling. The authors deftly balance the adventure and sense of wonder with solid worldbuilding and characters who quickly become familiar friends by the time their tales end. This collection will prove to be great reading for fans of the space cowboy antics of Guardians of the Galaxy, Firefly and Cowboy Bebop.” —RT Book Reviews [review]
In my role as editor of John Joseph Adams Books for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, I just acquired two books in a new epic fantasy series by Ashok Banker. Here’s the deal memo that just ran on Publishers Marketplace:
Indian author Ashok Banker’s UPON A BURNING THRONE and THE BLIND KING’S WRATH, the first two books of an epic fantasy series (pitched as like an “Indian GAME OF THRONES”) about siblings battling for control of a vast empire while a powerful demonlord pits them against each other, to John Joseph Adams Books, in a pre-empt, for publication in 2018 and 2019 (world).