After a Christmas/New Year/moving house break, Stranger Horizons returns! This is our regular round-up of interesting things SH contributors have been getting up to elsewhere. Enjoy.
First of all, a quick review of December projects, since there wasn't a post last month. Nisi Shawl's "Salt on the Dance Floor" (as the title suggests, another Michael Jackson-related story, following "Pataki" here a couple of years ago) appeared in Beast Within 3: Oceans Unleashed, ed. Jennifer Brozek. Renee Carter Hall's "Gingerbread Reindeer" was podcast at Anthro Dreams; Ken Liu's "The Perfect Match" was published in Lightspeed; and Sarah Kanning's "So Far Faithful", set in an old folks' home for failed revolutionaries, appeared at Daily Science Fiction. James S. Dorr had two stories out, "The Christmas Zombie" in At Year's End: Holiday SFF Stories, and "Appointment inTime" in Year's End: 14 Tales of Holiday Horror. Bruce Boston's poems "Running for the Ship" and "A Cautionary Note from the Time Thief" appeared in New Myths and The Silver Blade, respectively, while Sara Norja's "October's End" was in Chanterelle's Notebook. Carmen Machado's humourous essay "How to Almost Probably Not Die of Rabies" was in The Rumpus. And Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days, which includes work by SH alums Alexander Lumans and Tina Connolly, along with Margaret Atwood, Brian Evenson, Kelly Link, Joyce Carol Oates and many others, came out from Upper Rubber Boot Books.
On to January! The preliminary Stoker ballot is out and includes work by Bruce Boston, Jay Lake, Mary A Turzillo, Deborah Coates, and many others. Liz Argall's "Dear Ms Moon" has been adapted for the stage, having its debut on Saturday, with another performance on 2 February at the Brody Theatre in Portland, OR, as part of the Pulp Sampler festival.
On the new anthologies front, Nisi Shawl has edited Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars, including work by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Indrapramit Das, and Shweta Narayan, to raise money for the Octavia Butler Clarion scholarship fund. Lost and Lonely includes "Ghost Gardening", a new story by John Zaharick, and two poems by Sonya Taaffe, while Menial: Skilled Labor in Science Fiction, ed. Kelly Jennings and Shay Darrach, includes stories by M. Bennardo, Camille Alexa, Sabrina Vourvoulias, and others. Four Elements from Bad Moon Books includes poems by Marge Simon, Linda Addison, Charlee Jacob and Rain Graves. Alex Dally MacFarlane has announced the frankly excellent-looking table of contents for her upcoming anthology Aliens: Recent Encounters, which I'll be sure to mention again when it's published in June. And a special mention for the latest Cascadia Subduction Zone includes, among other things, Alan DeNiro's excellent essay, "We Have Never Been Postmodern: 'Walking Stick Fires' and the Knowability of Science Fiction", which is in part a response to the exhaustion-of-sf debate that did the rounds at the end of last year, and Lawrence Schimel's translation of Care Santos' poem "The Social Function of Poetry."
Other new books include several collections: Tom Doyle's The Wizard of Macatawa, which includes his SH stories "Crossing Borders" and "The Floating Otherworld" is available from Paper Golem books, while Adam Roberts' short story collection Adam Robots came out from Gollancz, and Stephen Ramey's Glass Animals has been published by Pure Slush. Marge Simon and Sandy DeLuca's collaborative poetry collection Dangerous Dreams will be out shortly from Elektrk Milk Bath Press.
Poetry: Rose Lemberg has been rounding up 2012 Poetry Recommendations by Editors, including Romie and AJ (but check out the whole series). AJ's "Terce(t)" is in the January Inkscrawl (and of course we published her "Fairy Beekeeper" -- bought before she joined the staff -- at the end of December). Also in Inkscrawl: Virginia M. Mohlere's "Note Accompanying", Sonya Taaffe's Deinde Centum", and Michele Bannister's "?tautahi in Spring". The January issue of Star*Line includes poems by Sofia Rhei ("Telescope", translated by Lawrence Schimel) and Marge Simon ("What Noah Left Behind"), and David C. Kopaska-Merkel ("Virtual Barkeep" and "de vermis nocturnis"); David is also interviewed at The Mystic Nebula, and Elizabeth Barrette has posted her poetry fishbowl report for January.
New stories this month include Andrew Kozma's "Baby" in the January Bound Off; Alex Dally Macfarlane's "Thin Slats of Metal, Painted" in Crossed Genres; A. C. Wise's "With Tales in Their Teeth, From the Mountain They Came" at Lightspeed; Marie Brennan's "Welcome to Welton", a free prequel to her urban fantasy Lies and Prophecy; and Stefan Hogberg is blogging (or indeed tumblring) his new story "The Morpheus Reports."
Finally, some non-fiction. Karen Burnham's BSFA Award-nominated essay, "The Complexity of the Humble Spacesuit", was posted at SF Signal. Martin Lewis is continuing his story-by-story review of the Hartwell/Cramer anthology The Space Opera Renaissance. Brit Mandelo reviews Blood Oranges by Kathleen Tierney aka Caitlin R Kiernan. Matt Hilliard has posted a long and thoughtful consideration of Kameron Hurley's Bel Dame Apocrypha. Niall Alexander has started a new column at Tor.com, the British Genre Fiction Focus (latest installment), while Liz Bourke's latest Sleeps With Monsters column is looking for lesbian SFF romance. James S Dorr has provided the introduction for Damnation Books' collection Telling Tales of Terror: Essays on Writing Horror and Dark Fiction. And Hunter Liguoure writes about the history of social science fiction in "Bracing for a Brave New World" at Perihelion.