With the intensive courses I’ve been teaching, I haven’t had time to reflect much on 2016, or all the stuff that happened last year. (And since today’s my wedding anniversary, I won’t be doing it now.) I’ll have a little time for things like that soon—after my courses end and I get the grades uploaded, sometime next week or early on during the week after—but for now, some happy news:
I’ve finally received my contributor’s copy of the December 2016 issue of Analog! Pretty exciting. I’ve actually had it for about a week, but have been too busy to mention it here.
In the time it took for the magazines to arrive here—yes, before I even laid eyes on the print edition—the story was picked up for three separate year’s best anthologies:
- The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois: the TOC here includes many wonderful authors and stories, including my pal Ian McHugh and our onetime instructor Ian R. MacLeod.
- Officially announced just the other day, Neil Clarke’s The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 2, where my story is in similarly flattering company.
- Finally, The Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction 9, edited by Allen Kaster: this project seems primarily to be an audiobook edition, though there are both print and ebook editions as well. (I haven’t seen a TOC online, but you can see the impressive contents of past editions here.)
That’s all very flattering!
But wait, there’s more:
I’ve just (yesterday) signed a contract for the story to appear in Chinese translation in Science Fiction World! (I’m told it should be appearing in the May issue, if things go according to plan.)
The response to the story has been amazing, and very encouraging, especially since for a long time I wasn’t sure if it would ever sell. Thanks everyone!
Oh, and the other day my wife was stocking up on SF novels and collections and happened to notice a title that seemed interesting: 데스 머신 (“Death Machine”). It turned out to the first volume of the Machine of Death series. When I mentioned I had a story in that book, she excitedly checked the table of contents, found it, and added the book to her “to-buy” pile. Though it’s not the first time I’ve seen my work in translation, it was the first time I ran across it in the wild, and it was pretty cool. Here’s the cover:
… and here’s the first page of my story (well, part of the first page):
“잘못 손질된 복어” is “Improperly Prepared Blowfish.”
(Sadly, the Korean edition did not include the interior illustrations from the original English-language books, but it’s still a pretty attractive book.)