I'm excitedly preparing to head down to Beyond Brookledge!

This from event organizer Bob Self:

Gaze upon this year's Beyond Brookledge giclée poster (which will be gifted to event attendees along with a few other treasures May 20-21st at the Mission Inn in Riverside).

On April 29-30 at Cal State Fullerton, fans, scholars, authors, and artists will celebrate surrealist science fiction author Philip K. Dick with an extravaganza of talks, panels, and exhibits! Special guests include Dr. Ursula Heise, Jonathan Lethem, Tim Powers, and James Blaylock. — Read the rest

The Philip K Dick Award is given to the best paperback original each year (past winners include Tim Powers' Anubis Gates, Rudy Rucker's Wetware, William Gibson's Neuromancer and Meg Elison's The Book of the Unnamed Midwife).

My first steampunk story, “The Ape-box Affair,” was published in Unearth magazine in 1978. I was paid half a cent a word for it and was happy to get the 40 bucks—and doubly happy simply to see it in print.

James P. Blaylock's Knights of the Cornerstone is a light, nostalgic contemporary fantasy steeped in legend. Blaylock is a master of this genre.

Cartoonist Calvin Bryson receives an odd package that causes him to return to his family's home in New Cypress, on the borders of California, Arizona and Nevada. — Read the rest

I picked up Harry Connolly's Bad Little Girls Die Horrible Deaths for his new Twenty Palaces story, and found myself thrilled with his collection of modern fairy tales.

I was looking for a new Twenty Palaces installment, and saw this collection of short stories. — Read the rest

SF author/physicist Gregory Benford reminisces about his friend Philip K. Dick:

Keyan sez, "FOGcon is a literary speculative fiction convention in the San Francisco Bay Area. Now in its 4th year, it's big enough to be fun, still small enough not to overwhelm. This year, the theme is Secrets, and the Guests of Honor are Seanan McGuire, Tim Powers, and the late James Tiptree, Jr. — Read the rest

The 2013 Locus Awards final ballot has been announced, and as ever, it is a fabulous guide signposting some of the very best work published science fiction and fantasy in the past year — a perfect place to start your explorations of the year's books. — Read the rest

Welcome to this year's Boing Boing Gift Guide, a piling-high of our most loved stuff from 2012 and beyond. There are books, comics, games, gadgets and much else besides: click the categories at the top to filter what you're most interested in—and add your suggestions and links in the comments.

The Library of America is publishing a two volume treasure of science fiction next September 27, in which great contemporary science fiction writers introduce classics of the field from the 1950s. The handsome, slipcased edition includes:

Volume 1: 1953–1956

* Frederik Pohl & C.

Colin sez, "Renovation is this year's World Science Fiction Convention and will take place in Reno, NV from 17-21 August. Boing Boing's own Cory Doctorow and many other SF writers, editors, publishers, artists, musicians, film-makers and more will be there along with well over 3,000 fans. — Read the rest

Welcome to the second half of the 2010 Boing Boing Gift Guide, where we pick out some of our favorite books from the last year (and beyond) to help you find inexpensive holiday gifts for friends and family. Can you guess who chose a Sarah Palin book?

A reader writes, "Tim Powers, James Blaylock, and K.W. Jeter, all Cal State Fullerton alumni, give their university's paper an interview about their creation of steampunk, their friendship with Philip K. Dick, writing bad poetry for the paper when they attended the school, and Powers' book 'On Stranger Tides' being optioned for the next 'Pirates of the Caribbean' movie." — Read the rest

In 2006, my friend Ken Hollings, author of Welcome to Mars, wrote and presented a BBC Radio 4 piece about Philip K. Dick's weird relationship with God. As Ken says, it's a "a strange tale of madness, machines and attempted suicide." — Read the rest

On Sunday, I was on a panel about steampunk at the Eastercon in Bradford with Tim Powers, one of the original creators of steampunk literature (see his Anubis Gate). Halfway through, Powers mentioned casually that he came to write a science-fictional book influenced by Victorian England after reading, London Labour and the London Poor , a classic text by Henry Mayhew. — Read the rest

In 1992, I graduated from the Clarion Writers' Workshop at Michigan State University, the famed six-week "boot-camp for science-fiction writers." It was an amazing experience: my instruction from the likes of Damon Knight, James Patrick Kelly, Lisa Goldstein, Nancy Kress and Kate Wilhelm forever changed me as a writer and a person. — Read the rest

After the talk at UT Austin, I spent Saturday at the Turkey City science fiction writers' workshop at Bruce Sterling's place. Turkey City is a venerable science fiction workshop that has spawned many good writers and a lexicon of science fiction critical terms that is the de facto standard for understanding what works and what doesn't in a work of science fiction:

Squid on the Mantelpiece

Chekhov said that if there are dueling pistols over the mantelpiece in the first act, they should be fired in the third.

As I mentioned earlier this morning, it's been ten years (!) since I attended the Clarion science fiction writers' workshop (though it hardly seems it!). Patrick Nielsen Hayden, my editor at Tor, has just left for the MSU campus at East Lansing, MI, to be the guest editor there. — Read the rest