The Antunite Chronicles trilogy by Terry Birdgenaw wins Firebird Book Awards!

SF Canada member Terry Birdgenaw never intended to write fiction, but COVID-19 stay-at-home orders created a perfect storm of motivation and opportunity. He enjoyed writing fiction so much that he created a trilogy, and the trilogy is now award winning!

 Antuna’s Story, Firebird’s first place winner for New Fiction, follows the lives of Earth insects transported through a wormhole to a far-off planet called Poo-ponic. Young Antuna encouraged the settlers to work together, but hexs later, conflicts resumed. Despite her convictions, Antuna could not save herself or her diverse friends from the devastation of war. Yet her legacy of Antunite insectism endured.

 The Rise and Fall of Antocracy, Firebird winner for Young Adult Fiction, is an Animal Farm-like story that tracks the insects’ evolution to cyborg insects, the growth and decline of a fledgling democracy, and the destruction of life on the planet caused by a long-ignored climate crisis. It also follows the utopian society created by a group of cyborg insects that escape to Poo-ponic’s moon, Bilaluna, before the planet’s  fragile atmosphere collapses.

The rulers in Firebird’s winner for Dystopian Fiction, Antunites Unite, create an Orwellian society that uses histrionics, bionics, and socionics to subjugate its citizens. An allegorical dystopian tale like 1984, it’s a brave new world out of this world, where freedom-loving spies from the nearby moon, Bilaluna, infiltrate the colony and start a revolution.

Although Birdgenaw riddles the novels with details about insect behavior, he is not an entomologist. Yet his Ph.D. studies in neuroscience and psychology allow him to understand human behavior and what makes autocrats tick. Insect and human behavior are quite similar, as both work together to enhance survival and fight those seen as different. Humans have the same core motivations as their tiny neighbors underfoot.

Find the trilogy here, and find Terry at TerryBirdgenaw.WordPress.com

Best Fan Writing and Publication: Polar Borealis!

Congratulations to SF Canada member R. Graeme Cameron, who has won a third Aurora Award for Best Fan Publication for Polar Borealis!

Wow!

My retirement hobby is promoting Canadian speculative fiction authors, poets, and artists.

Publishing Polar Borealis, with eight stories and eight poems plus cover art in every issue, is the joyful way I do this.

In reality, it is the talent, creativity and imagination of the contributors that makes Polar Borealis fun and intriguing to read. All I do is put it together.

In effect, it is the contributors who earned the award. It is the contributors who deserve the award.

BUT I am more than happy to accept this award on their behalf.

Thank you!

— R. Graeme Cameron’s Aurora acceptance speech 2022

SF Canada members on BPAA’s award shortlist!

Congratulations to our SF Canada members who are on the Book Publishers of Alberta Association’s shortlist for the Alberta Book Publishing Awards!

For the Douglas Barbour Award for Speculative Fiction, the following are shortlisted:

    • Seasons Between Us: Tales of Identities and Memories – edited by SF Canada members Susan Forest and Lucas K. Law of Laksa Media Groups Inc.
    • Tying the Knot, published by Tyche Books, SF Canada member Margaret Curelas, Acquisitions Editor (written by E.C. Bell)
    • Water: Selkies, Sirens, and Sea Monsters, published by Tyche Books, SF Canada member Margaret Curelas, Acquisitions Editor (edited by Rhonda Parrish)

Candas Jane Dorsey wins award!

SF Canada member Candas Jane Dorsey’s mystery novel, What’s the Matter with Mary Jane? has won the Crime Writers of Canada’s Whodunit Award for Best Traditional Mystery!

Dorsey manages to write with humour while remaining sensitive to serious issues like grief, gentrification, and privilege as well as how privilege might best be used for the greater good. The mystery itself unwinds as it should with information crucial to the solution sprinkled throughout, eventually arriving at a satisfying, though bittersweet, conclusion.
Crime Writers of Canada’s awards committee

This is the second installation of the Epitome Apartments Mystery Series.

A wise-cracking, grammar-obsessed, pansexual amateur sleuth is thrust into the world of the uber-rich when her enigmatic, now-famous childhood friend breezes back into her life begging for help with a dangerous stalker

Watch the awards ceremony on Youtube and find What’s the Matter with Mary Jane? at ECW Press.

Krista D. Ball wins 2 Stabby Awards!

One of the largest SFF online forums, with over one and a half million subscribers, r/Fantasy just held their annual Stabby Awards. SF Canada member Krista D. Ball won two this year:

Congratulations, Krista!