Monday... er, Tuesday roundup: SF&F focus issue!

Monday Tuesday roundup, as today is kind of a do-over Monday for me (and apparently lots of other people as well).

This week's issue of PW is our annual fantasy & science fiction focus issue, so we've got a boatload of interesting stuff. My fellow editor Peter Cannon has an article on the history of alternate history, Scott Connors discusses the politics of military SF, and Cherie Priest finds that Baen Books is recovering well from Jim Baen's death. Over in reviews section, we have reviews of Marie Brennan's Midnight Never Come (starred), Judith Tarr's Bring Down the Sun, Fiona McIntosh's Goddess, Paul L. Bates's Dreamer, and Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Mercy, as well as Patti O'Shea's In Twilight's Shadow in the mass market section. Finally, over in blog-land, I have a post following up last week's discussion of series with a taxonomy of series readers. Whew! Good times.

Do let me know what you think of the articles in particular; it's not too soon to start planning next year's focus issue. I've already got a mental note to see about adding horror to the genre list.

Gossip

Seen in today's Ansible:

"A Games Workshop mole reports sweeping cuts in their publishing arm after a poor Christmas for games sales. Marc Gascoigne, founder of the imprints Solaris (sf/fantasy) and Black Library (game ties), is now on 'gardening leave' with redundancy expected to follow. BL seems safe but the future of Solaris is less certain."

Anyone know anything about this? It's news to me.

Monday... er, Tuesday roundup

Monday Tuesday roundup! Apparently I struck a nerve with my latest blog entry for Notes from the Bookroom, in which I scold lazy series authors for making new readers work too hard. Lots of animated discussion going on over there; come join in!

Reviewed in the SF/F/H section of this week's PW: Thomas E. Sniegoski's A Kiss Before the Apocalypse, Maurice G. Dantec's Cosmos Incorporated, Katharine Kerr's The Shadow Isle, and the genre-bending anthologies Sideways in Crime (ed. Lou Anders) and Best Fantastic Erotica (ed. Cecilia Tan). Haven't had a chance to look for stealth specfic in the other sections, so if you spot any, let me know.

Work's been keeping me very busy. I've got a huge stack of July books, a smaller stack of August titles, and even a few Septembers. Our new layout offers new opportunities for bringing attention to SF/F/H titles, so I've been keeping an eye out for titles that warrant boxes and other special treatment, as well as lining up Q&As and author profiles. Needless to say, I'm enjoying this all tremendously. April 16th will be my anniversary at PW and I can barely believe it's been a whole year. I don't think I've ever been this happy at a job a year in. It's fabulous.