Jake Olefsky writes, "I am a puzzle author interested in story telling. I recently worked with award winning author Lavie Tidhar to create an interactive sci-fi puzzle story called 'Svalbard' that we just published on a new website that will hopefully have more puzzle stories in the future. The idea is that you read a chapter and then solve a puzzle to unlock the next chapter. The story branches in a non-linear fashion, so you can take different paths to the conclusion. In Svalbard you travel along with Mai as she explores a utopian post-apocalyptic world and discovers ancient time vaults, forgotten robot enclaves and slumbering super computers. There are over 30 puzzle to solve and secrets to discover in this 20 chapter short-story." Read the rest

Lavie Tidhar (previously) writes in about the new World SF bundle from Storybundle, launched today: it's 10 books, from authors Nalo Hopkinson, Lauren Beukes, Saad Z. Hossain, Deji Bryce Olukotun,Jeannette Ng, Francesco Verso and TOBI Hirotaka, plus anthologies Afro SF 3 and The Apex Book of World SF 5. It's just $15 for 10 books, and a part of anything received goes to charity - we've partnered up with English PEN, who work tirelessly to promote translated fiction and authors' rights around the world, as our chosen charity partner. It's a great opportunity to get a whole lot of international speculative fiction in one go and a low price." Read the rest

Locus Magazine has published its annual Locus Award finalists, a shortlist of the best science fiction and fantasy of the past calendar year. I rely on this list to find the books I've overlooked (so. many. books.). This year's looks like a bumper crop. Read the rest

Lavie Tidhar writes, "The Apex Book of World SF 4 is out today - this is the fourth volume of the series began in 2009, and features 28 stories from 25 countries, seven of which are translations, and it is the first volume to be edited by Mahvesh Murad - marking this also as the first genre anthology ever edited by a Pakistani woman." Read the rest

Lavie Tidhar writes, "Jews vs Zombies and Jews vs Aliens will be published as e-book originals on March 19th, and are currently available for pre-orders (a limited paperback will follow)." Read the rest

Lavie Tidhar writes, "My new novel, The Violent Century, is out today - billed as 'Watchmen meets Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,' it's a cold war noir thriller complete with Ãœbermenschen, Nazi war criminals, a murder, a love story, secrets and lies... Read the rest

The 30th edition of Gardner Dozois's Year's Best Science Fiction has been published today. This is consistently the best of the year's-best anthologies in the field -- absolutely indispensable. The series is celebrating the thirtieth milestone with an especially amazing installment. Editor Gardner Dozois explains:

It shows the continuing evolution of the field in the Twenty-First Century, as new types of people with new perspective and new approaches continue to come into it, people who might not have fit comfortably into John W. Campbell's largely white, male, middle-class, American stable of writers at ANALOG in the '30s and '40s. This volume contains work by Indian writers such as Indrapreamit Das and Vandana Singh, Israeli writers such as Lavie Tidhar, French writers such as Aliette de Bodard, Finnish writers like Hannu Rajaniemi, Australian writers such as Sean McMullen, Canadians such as Robert Charles Wilson, English writers such as Paul McAuley, Alastair Reynolds, and Adam Roberts, and lots of women writers, such as, in addition to the ones already named, Pat Cadigan, Eleanor Arnason, Elizabeth Bear, Carrie Vaughn, Linda Nagata, Megan Lindholm, Brit Mandelo, and Sarah Monette. In addition to new writers, short science fiction is now appearing widely outside of the traditional genre print magazines, and this anthology contains almost as many stories from online electronic sources as it does from print sources, including two stories (the Bear & Monette and the Robert Charles Wilson) that had only appeared before in audio form, as podcasts, and had never before been collected in print form.

Lavie Tidhar writes, "My new novel, MARTIAN SANDS (billed as Total Recall meets Schindler's List!) is now available - it's a remix of the Mars of Philip K. Dick and Edgar Rice Burroughs, a book about the Holocaust, possible time travel, A.I. and just a little bit of the Wizard of Oz." Read the rest

Lavie Tidhar writes, "We are now running the second World SF Travel Fund fund-raiser. The Fund was established in 2011 to help bring one or two international persons involved in science fiction, fantasy or horror to travel to a major genre event. The first recipient was Charles Tan from the Philippines, who travelled to the US for World Fantasy Con, and in 2012 we helped Swedish authors Nene Ormes and Karin Tidbeck travel to Toronto for the same convention.

This year, we hope to help bring over to World Fantasy Con in Brighton two more guests, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, a writer from the Philippines now resident in the Netherlands, and Csilla Kleinheincz, a Hungarian-Vietnamese writer, editor and translator.

We are looking to raise $3000 to help cover this and possibly next year." Read the rest

Lavie Tidhar writes, "Adolf Hitler's I Dream of Ants is World Fantasy Award winner Lavie Tidhar's graphic novel collaboration with British artist Neil Struthers. Originally serialised in the pages of now-defunct magazine Murky Depths, it is the story of a man named Adolf Hitler who becomes obsessed with the ants 'infesting' his suburban home."

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Lavie Tidhar sez, "The Apex Book of World SF 2 is now officially released and available on Amazon and elsewhere. This is the second book in the international SF/F series collecting short stories from around the world, and the only current one of its kind. It particularly focuses on African and Latin American writers, alongside writers from Asia and Europe, and includes Clarke Award winner Lauren Beukes, World Fantasy Award winner Nnedi Okorafor, original fiction from Cuba, India, China and Peru and much more." Read the rest

Lavie Tidhar sez, "We're launching the World SF Travel Fund, to to enable one international person involved in science fiction, fantasy or horror to travel to a major genre event. The first person will be Charles A. Tan, from the Philippines, who is currently nominated for a World Fantasy Award. We are running a fund-raiser with some amazing prizes, including an original illustration by China Mieville from Un Lun Dun, a special donation from Neil Gaiman, a whole score of books from PS Publishing, and e-books and other rewards from Angry Robot Books, Chizine, Apex Publications, Tachyon and PS Publishing. Read the rest

Lavie Tidhar sez, "As soon as I wrote this story I realised I would most likely have to self-publish it. To my delighted surprise, though, an editor at one of the big online [SF] magazines offered me, shortly after, to publish it. Two days later, however, the publisher of the same magazine declined the story, not wanting to deal with any potential fallout. I then showed it -- unofficially -- to a handful of people, and got a potential offer to publish it in another big magazine, if only I were to change some of the references in the story. I decided, instead, to publish it here."

There had been another boy at the school, called Ender, but he'd attacked and seriously hurt and in at least one case we knew of killed one of the other boys, and they finally had to put him down, though he kept protesting, the day they came for him, that it wasn't his fault.

No-one wanted to be put down at the school. They bred us very carefully, lines of genetic lineage, great-great-grandparents and parents all down the generations selected by the board and certified and mated to produce us. If we were an aberration we were put down and our progenitors were mated again, to try and create a better version.

My earliest memory is of white men in white coats holding clipboards, examining me. They measured my skull and prodded me with thick pink fingers and made careful notes. There was a war coming, they kept saying, and we had to be prepared.

Lavie Tidhar writes, "The World SF Blog is launching a new weekly fiction feature, beginning with Aliette de Bodard's "Melanie", with more stories lined up from South Africa, Israel, Brazil, India and the UK, amongst others. We're also having a limited promotional sale on The Apex Book of World SF, in both paperback and e-book editions." Read the rest

Israeli/UK/South Africa SF writer Lavie Tidhar writes, "At the World SF News Blog, we're running an international movie week this week at the World SF Blog, starting with short Israeli horror film EATEN, directed by Elad Rath and featuring none other than SF writer Nir Yaniv as the monster. We'll be showing trailers and whole films from South Africa, the Philippines, Russia and elsewhere."

MOVIE WEEK AT THE WSNB!

(Thanks, Lavie!)

Brett from small-press horror publisher Chizine sez, "ChiZine Publications (CZP) is an independent publisher of weird, surreal, subtle, and disturbing dark literary fiction hand-picked by Brett Alexander Savory and Sandra Kasturi, Bram Stoker Award-winning editors of ChiZine: Treatments of Light and Shade in Words. You've seen us mentioned recently here for books such as Lavie Tidhar & Nir Yaniv's The Tel Aviv Dossier, Robert Boyczuk's Horror Story and Other Horror Stories, David Nickle's Monstrous Affections, and Robert J. Wiersema's The World More Full of Weeping. Now those books, along with our whole catalogue, are available as low-cost DRM-free downloads, the full list of which includes:

- Brent Hayward's Filaria (novel) - Robert Boyczuk's Horror Story and Other Horror Stories (collection) - Lavie Tidhar & Nir Yaniv's The Tel Aviv Dossier (novel) - Daniel A. Rabuzzi's The Choir Boats (novel) - Robert J. Wiersema's The World More Full of Weeping (novella) - Claude Lalumière's Objects of Worship (collection) - David Nickle's Monstrous Affections (collection - which recently garnered starred reviews in both Publishers Weekly and Quill & Quire!)"

ChiZine Publications - Publishers - Digital Editions - Horror Mall

(Thanks, Brett!)

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Lavie Tidhar's story "Spider's Moon" is up on Futurismic, and it's a very rewarding ten-minute read. Futurismic's short-short fiction department publishes some genuinely wonderful science fiction, bite-sized stories that contain actual characters and settings and plots in impossibly small packages.

"Spider's Moon" is no exception: a story about spacefaring South Seas Islanders who come to Earth seeking mass-produced Vietnamese technology, and of what transpires; told with an admirable lyricism and poesie.

Melkior felt a little lost at Hoi An. He had arrived three days before, taking a room in a small hotel just outside the old town. It was, in many ways, a disconcerting experience. Once, Hoi An had been a trade centre, the meeting place of Chinese and European merchants on the coast of Viet Nam, and the old town had been preserved just as it had been, full of charming little cobbled streets and charming little temples and charming old houses - "Charm," the brochure insisted, "is the defining characteristic of the town". The old town was a bubble out of time, and visiting it was a wilful act of time-travel, or so it seemed to Melkior. The Hoi An lanterns ("Famous for hundreds of years," boasted the brochure) still hung everywhere, and barges still travelled down the river, pushed on long poles - and yet it was a lie, too, for the past was not really there, only its semblance, and who could believe in the past (not less a gentle, charming past) under the full spider's moon?