Category: Member News

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“Scuttle” in Abandon anthology

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SF Canada member Chantal Boudreau\’s horror story, “Scuttle”, has been published in the Abandon: 13 Tales of Impulse, Betrayal, Surrender, and Withdrawal anthology.

To act with abandon, in any sense of the word, is human. Whether it’s the sudden, strong urge to do something, either good or bad, or the act of betraying someone you love, we make choices that forever change our lives. Do you give into something or someone completely, or withdraw wholly into yourself?

Chantal Boudreau is an accountant by day and an author/illustrator during evenings and weekends, who lives by the ocean in beautiful Nova Scotia, Canada with her husband and two children. An Affiliate member of the Horror Writer’s Association, she writes and illustrates horror, sci-fi, steampunk and fantasy.  She has been published in Canada by Exile Editions in their Dead North and Clockwork Canada anthologies and her other Canadian publications include stories in Postscripts to Darkness Volume 5 and Masked Mosaic: Canadian Super Stories and Tesseracts 20: Compostela.  Outside of Canada, to date, she has published more than fifty speculative fiction stories with a variety of American and British publishers.

Print and ebooks of Abandon are available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and iBooks.

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Sandra Kasturi wins Sunburst Award

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SF Canada member Sandra Kasturi is the winner of the 2018 Sunburst Award for Short Story. “The Beautiful Gears of Dying” appeared in Laksa Media’s The Sum of Us anthology.

The Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic has celebrated the best in Canadian fantastic literature in both Adult and Young Adult publications since 2001. Winners receive a medallion that incorporates the Sunburst logo. Winners of both the Adult and Young Adult Sunburst Award also receive a cash prize of $1,000, while winners of the Short Story Sunburst Award receive a cash prize of $500.

The Sunburst Jury commented:
In a strong field with many outstanding stories, Sandra Kasturi’s “The Beautiful Gears of Dying” did for the jury what speculative writing does best, by using a fantastic/technological trope to explore the complexity of human relations and the texture of human life. Kasturi’s story is linguistically complex, economical, emotionally intense, and yet accessible, and it provokes recurring thoughts about our human predicaments.

Sandra Kasturi is a poet, writer and editor, and the co-publisher of the World Fantasy and British Fantasy Award-winning press, ChiZine Publications. Born in Estonia to an Estonian mother and Sri Lankan father, she now lives in Canada. She is the co-founder (with Helen Marshall) of the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium and the national Chiaroscuro Reading Series. Sandra’s work has appeared in various venues, including ON SPEC, Prairie Fire, several Tesseracts anthologies, Evolve, Chilling Tales, A Verdant Green, TransVersions, ARC Magazine, Taddle Creek, Abyss & Apex, 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin, and Stamps, Vamps & Tramps. Her two poetry collections are: The Animal Bridegroom (with an intro by Neil Gaiman) and Come Late to the Love of Birds. She is currently working on two books: a new poetry collection called Snake Handling for Beginners, as well as a story collection, Mrs. Kong & Other Monsters.

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New podcast, The Worldshapers

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SF Canada member Edward Willett hosts a new podcast featuring interviews with science fiction and fantasy authors about their creative processes.

All writers, when they set pen to paper or post pixel to page, are shaping a world: their own private world, created from their own thoughts and imagination, joys and sorrows, hopes and heartbreaks, triumphs and fears.

It is a kind of miracle, and very writer performs it in his or her own way. In The Worldshapers, Edward Willett, himself an award-winning writer of science fiction and fantasy, delves into the creative process with science fiction and fantasy writers of every kind, seeking to better understand this magical, mystical skill…the skill of worldshaping.

Find interesting and enlightening conversations with such high-profile writers as Julie Czerneda, Tanya Huff, John Scalzi, and Robert Sawyer at The Worldshapers.

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A Time and a Place released as an audio book

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SF Canada member Joe Mahoney’s A Time and a Place is now available at Audible.

Mahoney’s work is great for those who like their speculative fiction thoughtful, eloquent, and messy. — Publisher’s Weekly

Barnabus’ nephew is behaving oddly.

Calling upon Doctor Humphrey for assistance has not been particularly helpful because the good doctor’s diagnosis of demonic possession is clearly preposterous. Even the demon currently ensconced on the front-room couch agrees it’s preposterous. But then, how else to explain the portal to another world through which his nephew and Humphrey have just now disappeared?

Barnabus knows their only chance of rescue is for Barnabus J. Wildebear himself to step up and go through that portal.

Thus begins an existential romp across space and time, trampling on Barnabus’ assumptions about causality, free will, identity, good, and evil. Can Barnabus save his nephew – and incidentally, all of humanity?

Find more of Joe’s work, including a blog post on the creation of the audio book, at his website.

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2018 Aurora Award Winners!

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The Canadian Science Fiction & Fantasy Association has announced this year’s Aurora Award winners. We are very pleased to note that three SF Canada members were recognized for their outstanding achievements:

Susan Forest and Lucas K. Law won in the Best Related Work category for The Sum of Us: Tales of the Bonded and Bound anthology. Congratulations, Susan and Lucas!

Candas Jane Dorsey has been inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction & Fantasy Association Hall of Fame. Candas is internationally known for her contribution to the literature of the fantastic. Her oeuvre includes novels Black Wine (winner of Tiptree, Crawford and Aurora Awards) and Paradigm of Earth (shortlisted for Sunburst and Spectrum Awards); short story collections Machine Sex and other stories (containing the Aurora Award-winning storySleeping in a Box), Dark Earth Dreams, and Vanilla and other stories (winner of the WGA Short Fiction Award); four poetry books; several anthologies edited/co-edited, and stories, poems, reviews, critical essays, and rants in anthologies and magazines.

She was editor/publisher for nine years of Canadian independent SF publisher Tesseract Books, and for 14 years of a literary press, The Books Collective. She teaches writing and speaks internationally on SF and other topics. She was the founding president of SF Canada. She works as a freelance writer, editor and communications consultant, and is an active arts and community advocate.

Well deserved, Candas!

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Epic Fantasy in a Boxed Set

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Two SF Canada members share mysteries and magic in Secrets & Spells, a bundle of six epic fantasy novels. Dive into these fantastic realms of richly drawn characters and become lost in engrossing stories of friendship, adversity, and love.

Krista D. Ball’s The Demons We See (The Dark Abyss of Our Sins #1) is part of an ongoing series. Society was rocked when the Cathedral appointed Allegra, Contessa of Marsina, to negotiate the delicate peace talks between the rebelling mage slaves and the various states. Not only was she a highborn mage, she was a nonbeliever and a vocal objector against the supposed demonic origins of witchcraft.
Demons weren’t real, she’d argued, and therefore the subjection of mages was unlawful. That was all before the first assassination attempt. That was before Allegra heard the demonic shrieks. All before everything changed. Now Allegra and her personal guards race to stabilize the peace before the entire known world explodes into war with not just itself, but with the abyss from beyond.
So much for demons not being real.
Find more of Krista’s work at http://kristadball.com/

Jane Glatt‘s Unguilded (The Mage Guild #1) features Kara Fonti, who, at sixteen, still has no magic. But Mage Guild, the most powerful of all the Guilds in Tregella, has a use for her – they will force her to bear children for men who do have magic. Arabella Fonti, to protect her own status within the guild, pushes her daughter to do the unthinkable – run away to live outside the guild system.
But unguilded are not welcome in Tregella, especially on the magical chain of islands of the capital Rillidi. In increasing danger of being arrested or killed, Kara finds refuge on Old Rillidi, the original island that was neither created by magic nor controlled by one of the guilds.
On Old Rillidi, Kara discovers true friends, makes a home for herself, and learns more about her strange ability to “see” magic. But the Mage Guild will not let her go, and it is here where she feels safest that Kara is betrayed . . .
This novel and the rest of Jane’s series can be found at http://janeglatt.com