My latest short story An Unexpected Grace appears in Boundary Shock Quarterly 24: Science Fiction Holidays.
Still coming to terms with her decisions during a recent assignment, Corporal Siwela takes a leave-of-absence. Perhaps a holiday visit to her home community will help get her head straight. But the trip doesn’t go as planned. Marooned and wounded in the Martian outback, running out of air, Siwela won’t survive without aid. This wasn’t how she planned to spend Christmas.
Star Rider and the Golden Threads, by Heidi Skarie
While Toemeka is living in a secret dome-city for refugees, an urgent message arrives from Queen Koriann of Jaipar. Planetary-conqueror and sorcerer, Samrat Condor, is threatening to attack unless they surrender.
Toemeka goes to Jaipar, where she is reunited with Agent Erling Fenian, her former Coalition partner.
Can they save Jaipar together?
Club Codex is reading and discussing the Locus Award-winning novel “The Mountain in the Sea” by Ray Nayler through December 16. Please join us!
Arthur C. Clarke was one of the so-called Big Three of science fiction’s Golden Age. He served as a Royal Air Force radar specialist during World War II. He was twice the president of the British Interplanetary Society. Clarke originated the idea of using geostationary satellites as communications relays.
As a science fiction author, Clarke won a Hugo, a Locus, and a Heinlein award, along with several Nebulas. He’s a SFWA Grand Master and a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. Knighted in 2000, he was also nominated for both the Nobel Peace Prize and an Academy Award.
In 1986, Clarke funded the monetary prize for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. This honor recognizes “…the best science fiction novel first published in the United Kingdom during the previous year.”
The Arthur C. Clarke Award for 2023
Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman
Ned Beauman is the son of Nicola Beauman, the founder of Persephone Books. He attended Cambridge University and lives in London.
Here’s what Penguin Random House has to say about Beauman’s novel:
“The near future. Tens of thousands of species are going extinct every year. And a whole industry has sprung up around their extinctions, to help us preserve the remnants, or perhaps just assuage our guilt. For instance, the biobanks: secure archives of DNA samples, from which lost organisms might someday be resurrected . . . But then, one day, it’s all gone. A mysterious cyber-attack hits every biobank simultaneously, wiping out the last traces of the perished species. Now we’re never getting them back.
Karin Resaint and Mark Halyard are concerned with one species in particular: the venomous lumpsucker, a small, ugly bottom-feeder that happens to be the most intelligent fish on the planet. Resaint is an animal cognition scientist consumed with existential grief over what humans have done to nature. Halyard is an exec from the extinction industry, complicit in the mining operation that destroyed the lumpsucker’s last-known habitat.
Across the dystopian landscapes of the 2030s—a nature reserve full of toxic waste; a floating city on the ocean; the hinterlands of a totalitarian state—Resaint and Halyard hunt for a surviving lumpsucker. And the further they go, the deeper they’re drawn into the mystery of the attack on the biobanks. Who was really behind it? And why would anyone do such a thing?”
Questions or comments? Please share your thoughts!
A cautionary fish tale